Standing stone, Cnoc Sathairn, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Cnoc Sathairn, Co. Cork

On the southern edge of Cloneera Wood in County Cork, on level pasture near a place called Cnoc Sathairn, there is nothing left to see.

That absence is itself the story. Where three prehistoric stones once stood in marshy ground, two upright and one fallen, there is now no visible surface trace. The stones have been removed entirely, leaving behind only the measurements and observations recorded by a researcher named Conlon in 1918.

Conlon's notes are precise enough to conjure something. Stone A stood two feet high and a foot and a half broad. Stone B, the tallest of the pair still standing, reached three feet nine inches and was positioned just under five feet from A. The prostrate stone, C, was considerably larger, nearly six feet long and over three feet broad, lying flat some four feet from B. All three sat in marshy ground, and Conlon observed that several other stones were scattered nearby. This led him to suggest that the grouping might have been the remains of a stone circle, the kind of circular prehistoric monument found widely across Cork and Kerry, typically associated with the Bronze Age. That possibility was never confirmed, and the ordnance survey maps of 1842, 1904, and 1946 do not mark the stones at all, though the Munster Archaeological Survey, based at University College Cork, did note the location on the 1904 six-inch map. The site was already slipping out of record even as it was being noticed.

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