Standing stone, Killasseragh, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
On a south-facing pasture slope in Killasseragh, County Cork, a large stone lies against a field fence, no longer upright, no longer in its original position.
It measures two metres in length and roughly a metre across at its widest, substantial enough that its demotion from standing monument to boundary filler feels like a quiet act of erasure rather than simple practicality.
The stone was still standing in 1897, when a writer named Franklin recorded its height as approximately five feet six inches. At that point it would have read clearly in the landscape as a standing stone, the kind of upright prehistoric marker, typically dating from somewhere in the Bronze Age, that was set into the ground as a boundary indicator, a ritual focal point, or a waymarker, purposes that archaeologists continue to debate. At some point after Franklin's visit it was removed from its socket and repositioned, ending up where it now rests, incorporated into the line of a field boundary on the south-facing slope.