Standing stone, Derrygortnacloghy, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Derrygortnacloghy, Co. Cork

Some monuments earn their place in the record by surviving against the odds.

This one in Derrygortnacloghy, mid-Cork, earns it by disappearing entirely. A standing stone that was visible and mapped twice, once in 1842 and again in 1904, on the Ordnance Survey six-inch sheets, has since been removed without leaving any surface trace. The north-facing pasture slope where it once stood gives nothing away.

What makes the absence quietly interesting is the context. Roughly 130 metres to the west sits a wedge tomb, one of Ireland's most common megalithic monument types, typically dating to the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age, in which a tapering stone-roofed burial chamber is set into the ground with the wider end generally facing west. Standing stones are frequently found in loose association with such monuments, though whether the relationship between this particular stone and that particular tomb was deliberate, functional, or simply coincidental is now impossible to say. By the time the 1904 map was made the stone was still present; at some point after that, in a field being worked as pasture, it was taken out. Whether it was broken up, repurposed as a gatepost or field boundary, or simply buried is unrecorded.

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