Standing stone, Cloontreem, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Cloontreem, Co. Cork

A small, battered stone protrudes from a boggy terrace on the Beara Peninsula, barely knee-high and easy to overlook entirely.

What makes it worth a second glance is its persistence: a prehistoric standing stone, a class of monument erected across Ireland during the Bronze Age, typically as a marker, boundary indicator, or focal point in a ritual landscape, still upright after thousands of years in rough pasture on a south-west-facing hillslope above Castletownbere.

The stone itself is modest by any measure. It stands just 0.9 metres tall and measures 0.6 metres by 0.3 metres at its base, irregular in plan and orientated along a north-east to south-west axis. The upper portion of its north-west face has broken away at some point, leaving an already compact monument looking slightly diminished. It sits partly subsumed by the bog, which has crept around its base over the centuries, so that the stone appears to protrude rather than stand cleanly. The view from this terrace stretches south-west towards Castletownbere, Berehaven Harbour, and the Miskish Mountains, a wide and open prospect that may or may not have been relevant to whoever chose this precise spot to erect the stone.

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Pete F
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