Standing stone, Lisnashandrum, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
A lone stone standing in a Mid Cork pasture might seem unremarkable until you consider that the cartographers who mapped this landscape twice, in 1842 and again in 1903, apparently did not record it at all.
Whether it was obscured, overlooked, or simply not considered worthy of notation by the Ordnance Survey teams of those eras, the stone quietly persisted in the grass at Lisnashandrum without making it onto either the first or second edition six-inch maps.
The stone itself is a solid presence: 1.64 metres tall and subrectangular in plan, meaning its cross-section is roughly rectangular with softened or irregular edges rather than a precise geometric form. It measures 0.65 metres by 0.42 metres across, and its base shows wear, the kind of gradual erosion that accumulates over a very long time at the point where stone meets soil. Standing stones of this type are among the most enigmatic monuments in the Irish landscape; their original purposes remain genuinely uncertain, with proposed explanations ranging from territorial markers and burial monuments to astronomical alignments and assembly points. The absence of this particular example from nineteenth-century mapping does not mean it was unknown locally, only that it escaped, or was excluded from, the official cartographic record during two separate surveys.