Standing stone, Clonomara, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
There is a site in Clonomara, County Cork, that is listed among the standing stones of West Cork and yet has nothing to show for it.
No upright slab, no stump, no scatter of displaced rubble. The field where it once stood is pasture, and the ground gives no indication that anything was ever there at all.
The stone was removed around 1950, which places its disappearance in a period when prehistoric monuments across rural Ireland were frequently cleared from agricultural land without record or ceremony. Standing stones, which were typically single upright blocks set into the earth in prehistory, served purposes that remain debated, ranging from territorial markers to ritual functions, and many have survived for millennia only to vanish within living memory. The Clonomara example is among them. What it looked like, how tall it stood, and precisely where within the townland it was sited are details that were not recorded before it was taken down.