Standing stone, Maughanasilly, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Maughanasilly, Co. Cork

In a low-lying patch of scrub in Maughanasilly, west Cork, a rectangular standing stone rises just over a metre from the ground, oriented precisely along a northeast-southwest axis.

That deliberate alignment is the first thing that marks it out. These stones were not dropped casually into the landscape; somebody, at some point in prehistory, chose this spot and this orientation with apparent intention, even if the reasoning behind that choice has long since dissolved.

The stone measures roughly 0.95 metres across and 0.35 metres thick, modest in scale but upright and present. What makes the site more intriguing is a prostrate slab lying about four metres to the south. Local mapping refers to two features here as "Gallauns", the Irish term for standing stones, and it is possible that the fallen slab was once a second upright companion. If so, this would have been a paired arrangement, a type of monument found elsewhere in Cork and Kerry, where two stones were set close together, sometimes in alignment with solar or lunar events, though what exactly was being marked or commemorated remains a matter of ongoing interpretation. The scrubby, low ground around the stone gives it an unassuming setting, the kind of place easy to pass without a second glance, which perhaps explains why its companion, if that is what the slab is, ended up horizontal.

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Pete F
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