Standing stone, Coolowen, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
In the pastureland of Coolowen in County Cork, a standing stone has effectively vanished.
It still appears in the archaeological record, but visit the east-facing slope where it was once planted upright in the ground and there is nothing to see; no visible surface trace remains.
What makes this absence historically interesting is what it implies about the past. The stone was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, one of the most ambitious cartographic projects ever undertaken in Ireland, which documented the landscape in extraordinary detail. The surveyors noted it simply as an upright stone, without giving it a name. Standing stones of this kind are among the most common prehistoric monuments in Ireland, typically dating from the Bronze Age, and their original purposes remain a matter of debate. Some appear to mark boundaries, burial sites, or routeways; others may have had ritual or astronomical significance. This particular example had been standing long enough by the nineteenth century to be considered worth recording, yet at some point between that survey and the present it disappeared from view, whether toppled, buried, or removed entirely is not known.