Standing stone, Cathair Daithí, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Cathair Daithí, Co. Cork

On the summit of an east-west ridge in County Cork, a three-metre standing stone rises out of heavy overgrowth, subrectangular in plan with its long axis oriented northeast to southwest.

It is not alone up there, or at least it was not always. A second, much smaller stone once stood just over a metre away, and the whole site sits within roughly sixty-five metres of both a ringfort and yet another standing stone, making this ridge an unusually dense cluster of prehistoric monuments in a landscape that rarely announces itself.

The site takes its name from Cathair Daithí, and the stones were noted as early as 1898 by Murphy, who recorded both of them in a brief reference. By 1918, Conlon was able to give more precise measurements for the companion stone, describing it as standing one foot nine inches high, three feet four inches broad, and three feet four inches thick, with the two stones set three feet four inches apart. That second stone, so carefully measured by Conlon, appears to have since become lost to the vegetation or collapsed; the surviving stone, at three metres tall and measuring just over a metre by half a metre at its base, is the dominant presence. A ringfort, of the type common across Ireland as a circular earthwork enclosure associated with early medieval settlement, lies close by to the west, suggesting the ridge was significant across several different periods of use.

The site sits in considerable overgrowth, which means the approach is not straightforward and the smaller stone, if it survives at all, would require careful searching to locate. The surviving standing stone is substantial enough to find, but the surrounding vegetation makes the full context of the cluster difficult to read from ground level.

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