Standing stone, Crinnaloo, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Crinnaloo, Co. Cork

In a farmyard in Crinnaloo, Co. Cork, a large flat slab rests on timber supports and does the practical work of a workbench.

It measures roughly 1.8 metres by 0.9 metres and is about 25 centimetres thick, which is not unusual for a sturdy farm surface. What is unusual is what it almost certainly once was: part of a standing stone, the kind that would have risen considerably above a person's head, now horizontal, repurposed, and quietly getting on with things.

The scholar R.A.S. Macalister noted in 1945 that this slab was a fragment of a much taller stone that originally stood within a nearby ringfort, the circular enclosed settlements that dot the Irish countryside and date broadly to the early medieval period. A separate section of the same stone survives elsewhere and carries what may be an ogham inscription. Ogham is an early Irish script, typically carved as a series of notches and strokes along the edge of a stone, and it appears on monuments dating mainly from the fourth to the seventh centuries. Whether the inscription on the companion piece is genuine ogham or something more ambiguous has not been definitively settled. As for the slab in the farmyard, four scored marks were observed along its underside edge, the face that sits turned towards the yard. These look less like ancient carving and more like the kind of marks left by someone sharpening an iron tool, an activity that might have taken place at any point across many centuries of farm use.

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Pete F
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