Standing stone, Nohaval, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Nohaval, Co. Cork

Some archaeological sites are remarkable for what they contain.

This one is remarkable for what is no longer there. In the Nohaval townland of north Cork, a standing stone once lay recumbent on land belonging to a J. Daly, positioned twelve yards east of a neighbouring stone in what was a loose cluster of six such monuments. It measured seven feet and one inch in length by two feet and two inches wide. Sometime around 1957 it was removed, and today there is no visible surface trace of it whatsoever.

Standing stones are among the most enigmatic prehistoric features in the Irish landscape, single or grouped upright slabs whose original purposes, whether boundary markers, ritual focal points, or astronomical alignments, remain largely a matter of debate. The Nohaval stone had already fallen or been pushed flat by the time it was documented by Bowman in 1934, which means it had long ceased to stand in any conventional sense. That a stone already lying on the ground could still be considered part of an active archaeological grouping underlines how these sites were understood and catalogued even in a diminished state. Its subsequent disappearance, apparently within a couple of decades of that recording, is not unusual for mid-twentieth-century rural Ireland, where land improvement and agricultural change quietly erased countless low-profile monuments. What survives now is only the record of its dimensions, its location relative to its neighbours, and the name of the farmer on whose land it once rested.

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