Standing stone, Cloghphilip, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Cloghphilip, Co. Cork

In a tilled field in Cloghphilip, mid-County Cork, a standing stone rises just over a metre from the ground, unremarked by any roadside sign and surrounded, in all likelihood, by whatever crop the season demands.

It is not a towering megalith. At 1.25 metres high and roughly 1.22 metres by 0.3 metres at its base, it is more the size of a stout gravestone, subrectangular in cross-section, and oriented with its long axis running north-northwest to south-southeast.

Standing stones of this kind are scattered across the Irish countryside in their thousands, yet individually they remain poorly understood. Most are presumed to date from the Bronze Age, erected somewhere between 2500 and 500 BC, though firm dating is rarely possible without excavation. Their purposes are debated: boundary markers, sites of ritual or assembly, astronomical alignments, or simple memorials. The orientation here, along a NNW-SSE axis, may or may not be meaningful; some researchers have noted correlations between standing stone alignments and lunar or solar events, though such connections are difficult to prove for any single stone. What is clear is that whoever placed this one chose to do so in ground that has been worked and turned by farmers across the centuries, and the stone has outlasted all of them.

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