Standing stone, Derrymihin, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
In a pasture on a south-facing slope in Derrymihin, west Cork, a single standing stone rises just over a metre from the ground, rectangular in plan and oriented along a WNW-ESE axis.
It is not especially tall, not especially dramatic, and that is rather the point. Stones like this one were set into the Irish landscape thousands of years ago, and for the most part they have simply stayed there, outlasting every human structure built anywhere near them, accumulating no explanation beyond the fact of their presence.
The stone measures 1.08 metres in height, with a face of roughly 0.52 by 0.33 metres, giving it a solid, deliberate proportionality that distinguishes it from a glacial erratic or a field clearance stone set upright for convenience. Its alignment along the WNW-ESE axis is a detail that archaeologists note carefully, since deliberate orientation is one of the few clues that prehistoric standing stones leave behind about their original purpose, whether marking a solar or lunar event, a territorial boundary, a burial, or a route through the land. The stone was recorded by O'Shea and Crowley in 1972 and subsequently included in the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, a systematic survey of west Cork's prehistoric and early historic remains published in 1992. West Cork is unusually dense with such monuments, a landscape where the prehistoric past has not been entirely buried under later settlement.
