Standing stone, Knockanreagh, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
A standing stone in a West Cork pasture sounds straightforward enough, but the site at Knockanreagh carries a small complication: it is not entirely standing, and not entirely in its original place.
The main stone rises in open grazing land with wide views opening out to the south and west, the kind of orientation that recurs across prehistoric monument landscapes in Ireland, though whether that alignment was intentional is something no one can now say with certainty.
The complication involves a second stone. Until 1983, a prostrate stone, meaning one lying flat rather than upright, lay roughly 55 metres to the south of the main monument. That year it was moved to the western side of a nearby lane, where it remains. It is a modest slab by any measure, running to about 1.45 metres in length and 0.75 metres across, with a thickness of around 0.2 metres. Whether it had always been recumbent or had at some earlier point stood upright is not recorded. The move itself, while presumably practical from a farming or access point of view, means the spatial relationship between the two stones, which might once have held some meaning or at least some interest, can no longer be read as it was.