Standing stone, Cloonshear Beg, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Cloonshear Beg, Co. Cork

A solitary stone rises from a patch of rough grazing in Cloonshear Beg, in mid Cork, irregular in outline and modest in height, the sort of thing that could easily be mistaken for a natural outcrop by anyone passing without purpose.

It stands just 1.1 metres tall and measures roughly 0.9 metres by 0.6 metres at its base, its long axis oriented northeast to southwest, a alignment that may be deliberate or may simply reflect how the stone happened to split from whatever source it was hauled from, centuries or millennia ago. Standing stones, as a class of monument, are among the most enigmatic survivals in the Irish landscape; erected from the Neolithic through to the early medieval period, they have been interpreted variously as boundary markers, ritual focal points, and memorials, though in most individual cases the original purpose remains genuinely unknown.

What makes this particular stone quietly interesting is an absence as much as a presence. When the Ordnance Survey mapped Ireland at six inches to the mile in 1842, one of the most systematic cartographic exercises ever carried out in the country, this stone was not recorded. That omission does not mean it was unrecognised locally, only that it escaped the surveyors' attention, or was not considered sufficiently significant to note. Plenty of standing stones appear on those early OS sheets; the ones that do not are a reminder that the nineteenth-century record, thorough as it was, captured only what was visible and deemed worth marking on a given day's work.

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Pete F
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