Standing stone, Cloghboola More, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Cloghboola More, Co. Cork

On a north-east-facing slope in Cloghboola More, there is a conspicuous absence.

A standing stone, known in Irish as a gallán, once rose eight feet from the pasture here, a substantial upright block four feet square at its base. It was removed around 1984, leaving behind only the documentary record of what had stood for, in all likelihood, several thousand years.

The stone was noted in 1937 by a recorder named Broker, who measured it carefully and logged it as a gallán of considerable size. Galláin are among the most ancient and least understood monuments in the Irish landscape, single standing stones erected during the Bronze Age or earlier, their original purpose remaining a matter of speculation. They may have marked boundaries, burial sites, astronomical alignments, or routeways. Whatever this particular stone once signified, it stood within roughly a hundred metres of a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead that was widespread in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular earthen bank surrounding a dwelling area. The proximity of the two monuments hints at a landscape that was organised and meaningful across very different periods of prehistory and early history, though the relationship between them, if any, is unknown.

The stone's removal in the early 1980s was not an unusual fate. Across Ireland, standing stones were cleared from fields throughout the twentieth century, lost to agricultural improvement with little fanfare. This one left behind just a brief measurement and a question about why it disappeared when it did.

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