Standing stone, Longstone, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Longstone, Co. Cork

The place is called Longstone, which is itself a name that promises something ancient and upright in the landscape.

There is, however, nothing there to see. The standing stone that presumably gave the townland its name has been removed entirely, leaving no visible surface trace, and the ground where it once stood on a north-facing slope in pasture gives nothing away.

What we know of the stone itself comes from a single early twentieth-century record. Condon, writing in 1916, described a greyish stone measuring 58 inches high, 20 inches broad, and 8 inches thick, proportions that suggest a fairly substantial slab, the kind of upright monolith erected across Ireland during the Bronze Age, often as a boundary marker, a waypoint, or a focus for now-forgotten ritual. That record is the stone's only reliable documentation. It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1842 or 1904, which is itself quietly telling. Either it had already been displaced by those dates, or the surveyors simply did not note it. Either way, by the time anyone thought to look carefully, it was already a thing described rather than observed.

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