Standing stone, Knock, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Knock, Co. Cork

Along the southeastern edge of the townland of Knock in County Cork, a large stone once stood roughly six feet clear of the ground.

It no longer stands. At some point it was broken and shifted, and what may be its remains, a slab measuring around two and a half metres in length and roughly square in section, lies beside a field fence in uneven scrub near the townland boundary. The stone's fate is the kind of quiet archaeological loss that happens without ceremony and is noticed mainly in retrospect.

The stone was known as Clochbawn, or in Irish Cloch Bhán, meaning the white stone. Ordnance Survey field workers recorded it in 1838 and again in 1840, noting its height and passing on the name. A later researcher, Grove White, preserved those observations in print in the early twentieth century. By 1934, when Bowman wrote about it, the stone had already been broken and removed. Bowman also noted that the name Cloch Bhán applied not just to the stone itself but to roughly forty acres on the southeastern part of the townland, suggesting the monument had been a significant enough landmark to give its character to a whole tract of land. Standing stones of this kind are prehistoric markers whose precise original purpose is rarely certain, whether boundary indicator, ritual focus, or memorial, but the fact that this one named its surrounding landscape implies it had been a local reference point for a very long time before it fell.

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