Standing stone, Munnane, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Munnane, Co. Cork

On a hilltop in Munnane, in the west of County Cork, there is a standing stone that can no longer be seen.

It sits in pasture, or rather it once did, and what makes it worth noting is precisely that absence: a prehistoric monument reduced to a cartographic memory, its physical presence swallowed by centuries of soil and agriculture.

The stone appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, recorded as a single upright stone on elevated ground. It was labelled "Gallauns", a term used in Irish archaeology for standing stones, typically large, undressed prehistoric monoliths whose original purpose remains debated but is generally associated with ritual, burial, or territorial marking. Notably, the name was applied to this stone alongside a second stone located one field away, suggesting the two were understood locally as a pair, or at least as belonging to the same named category of ancient things. That second stone, a separate monument, is recorded independently. Whether the two were ever functionally related is unknown, but their proximity and shared name hints at a landscape that was once more legible in these terms than it is today. By the time of more recent survey work, this stone had left no visible surface trace, meaning it may be buried, removed, or simply lost within the ground it once marked.

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Pete F
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