Standing stone, Oldcastle, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
A small stone standing alone on a west-facing slope in Oldcastle, County Cork, managed to escape official notice for a remarkably long time.
Neither the 1842 nor the 1903 Ordnance Survey six-inch maps record its presence, which means that two of the most thorough cartographic exercises ever conducted across the Irish countryside passed it by entirely. Whether it was obscured by vegetation, dismissed as a field stone, or simply missed, the result is the same: a prehistoric monument that spent the better part of recorded history unacknowledged.
The stone itself is modest by the standards of Irish standing stones, which range from stumpy markers to imposing monoliths several metres tall. This one rises to just 0.7 metres, with a footprint of roughly 0.6 metres by 0.35 metres, irregular in plan and oriented with its long axis running roughly north-northwest to south-southeast. It sits in rough grazing land, the kind of marginal ground that often preserves older features simply because no one has had much reason to disturb it. The precise date of its erection is unknown, as is common with standing stones, which were raised across Ireland from the Neolithic through to the Bronze Age and occasionally later, serving purposes that may have included burial marking, boundary definition, or astronomical alignment. None of those functions can be confidently assigned here on present evidence.