Standing stone, Gortnahoughtee, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
At Gortnahoughtee in mid Cork, a single standing stone rises from the landscape where two once stood.
The loss of one stone is, in its quiet way, the most telling detail about this site. Somewhere between the making of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, which recorded both stones, and the present day, one disappeared, leaving its companion to mark a spot that was clearly considered significant enough, at some point in prehistory, to warrant the effort of raising more than one upright.
The surviving stone stands 1.45 metres tall and is roughly rectangular in plan, measuring 0.85 metres by 0.62 metres at its base, with its long axis oriented northeast to southwest. Standing stones, which are simply large upright blocks of stone set into the ground by human hand, are among the most enigmatic monuments in the Irish landscape. Their purposes are not well understood; alignment with solar or lunar events, territorial marking, and commemoration of the dead have all been proposed at various sites, though rarely confirmed. The northeast to southwest orientation here may or may not be meaningful, but it is the kind of detail that tends to attract attention when patterns are sought across multiple sites in a region.