Standing stone, Clashanure, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Clashanure, Co. Cork

A standing stone that no longer stands is already a quietly melancholy thing, but the one at Clashanure in mid Cork carries an extra layer of strangeness.

Sometime around 1977, the stone was removed from its original position on a north-facing slope and left lying on its side roughly fifty metres to the south, at the edge of a small forestry plantation. It has been horizontal ever since, an irregular lump of roughly cubic proportions measuring just under a metre in length and about 0.76 by 0.77 metres across, displaced from whatever purpose or meaning once kept it upright.

Standing stones are among the most enigmatic monuments in the Irish landscape. Most date to the Bronze Age, though firm dating is rarely possible without excavation, and their original functions remain genuinely contested, ranging from territorial markers to astronomical alignments to memorial stones. What makes the Clashanure example particularly interesting is not its size, which is modest, but its folklore. Local tradition holds that this stone is one of a pair, and that both were flung here by a giant. The companion stone, recorded separately, presumably lies somewhere nearby. Giant-throwing legends attach themselves to prehistoric monuments across Ireland with considerable frequency, and they tend to preserve, in distorted form, a folk memory that these objects are very old and not of ordinary human making. Whether anyone now remembers the specific giant or the precise direction of the throw is another matter.

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