Standing stone, Gortnalicky, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Gortnalicky, Co. Cork

A single upright stone in a field in Gortnalicky, mid-Cork, was apparently unknown to, or unrecorded by, the cartographers who produced the first detailed Ordnance Survey maps of Ireland in 1842.

That omission is itself quietly telling. Standing stones are among the most common prehistoric monument types in Ireland, typically dating to the Bronze Age, yet they were not always recognised for what they were, and many passed unremarked into the agricultural landscape, absorbed into field boundaries or simply ignored as inconvenient lumps of rock.

This one sits atop a low knoll in pasture, which is exactly the kind of modest elevated position that seems to have mattered to whoever erected it. The stone measures 1.44 metres in height and is irregular in plan, roughly 0.63 metres by 0.27 metres at its widest and narrowest faces. Its long axis runs northeast to southwest, an orientation that recurs at standing stones across Ireland, though whether that alignment carried astronomical, territorial, or ritual significance remains a matter of ongoing debate. At the base, packing stones are still exposed, the wedged material used to stabilise the upright when it was first set into the ground, a detail that gives the monument an unexpected immediacy, as though the work of installation were only recently finished rather than millennia old.

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Pete F
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