Standing stone, Glashaboy, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Glashaboy, Co. Cork

A stone that was once lost to the record and then found again has a particular quality that most prehistoric monuments lack: a small, quiet drama attached to its rediscovery.

On a gentle east-facing slope in the Glashaboy area of County Cork, a standing stone sits in open pasture, orientated northeast to southwest. It is not a tall or imposing specimen, standing at around 0.94 metres, and the upper half tapers noticeably, suggesting that at some point the stone was broken. Propped against its southern side, embedded in the ground, is a second stone roughly 0.4 metres high and 0.45 metres wide, which may well be the missing upper section, resting where it fell or was placed, perhaps centuries ago.

Standing stones, large upright stones set into the ground in prehistory, are common across Ireland and are generally thought to date from the Bronze Age, though their precise purposes remain debated. They may have served as boundary markers, ritual focal points, or memorials. This particular example entered the written record in 1916, when Condon noted it to the right of the road running from Carrignavar to Battle Hill, describing it as five feet high, eighteen inches broad, with a girth of five feet four inches, and remarking that it was very much out of perpendicular. Those measurements, more generous than what surveyors later recorded on the ground, raise the possibility that Condon was measuring a different stone, or that the visible portion has since changed. For some decades after 1994, when it appeared in a published county inventory, the exact location remained uncertain, and the stone was effectively lost in plain sight until fieldwork confirmed its whereabouts in pasture land.

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