Standing stone, Cashel More, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
In the landscape of Cashel More in County Cork, a standing stone is notable less for where it now stands than for where it no longer does.
The stone, which today occupies the grounds of Cashelmore House, was not placed there originally. It was moved, at some point, from its first home inside a trivallate ringfort, leaving that site without one of its defining features and giving a private garden something altogether older than its walls.
A trivallate ringfort is a circular enclosure defended by three concentric banks and ditches, a more elaborate arrangement than the single-bank raths that are common across Ireland, and one that has sometimes been associated with higher-status occupants. The standing stone within such a fort would have been a significant presence, whether it marked a boundary, a burial, or something less easily categorised. The precise circumstances of its removal to the grounds of Cashelmore House are not recorded, but the move itself is a quiet piece of local intervention, the kind of antiquarian or practical act that reshaped countless Irish monuments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when landed estates had both the means and the inclination to redecorate their demesnes with ancient stonework.