Standing stone, Lisladeen, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
A stone lies face-down in a bog at Lisladeen in mid Cork, and it is not entirely clear that anyone placed it there intentionally.
At 1.7 metres long and roughly a metre wide, it is a substantial slab, and along its length run faint score lines whose origin and purpose remain unexplained. Whether those marks are the work of human hands or the result of natural weathering and pressure is an open question, and that ambiguity is part of what makes the site quietly compelling.
What is known is that the stone does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of either 1842 or 1903, which is an unusual absence for a monument of this size. Standing stones, typically tall single slabs set upright in the ground during prehistory, are among the more commonly recorded features in the Irish landscape, and their omission from nineteenth-century mapping usually suggests one of two things: the stone had already fallen and been overlooked by surveyors, or it was not recognised at the time as a monument at all. In this case the stone is now fallen, lying in bogland, and the surrounding peat may have concealed or obscured it during the periods when those maps were made. Bogland has a way of swallowing things gradually, preserving them below the surface while erasing their outline from the visible landscape above.