Standing stone - pair, Bawnmore, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone – pair, Bawnmore, Co. Cork

Two standing stones in a field beside the Laney River in mid Cork might easily be passed off as stray boulders, but their arrangement gives them away.

Set just 1.25 metres apart and aligned along a NNE-SSW axis, they form what archaeologists classify as a stone pair, a monument type found across Munster and generally attributed to the Bronze Age. The overall length of the pair, measured tip to tip, is 3.4 metres, and the two stones differ noticeably from one another in shape and bearing.

The north-eastern stone is the more compact of the two, around 0.55 metres long and 0.45 metres thick, rising to a height of 1.65 metres. Its south-western companion is broader and taller in potential, measuring 1.6 metres in length and 0.6 metres in thickness, and would stand approximately 1.75 metres high if fully upright; as it is, it leans distinctly to the east. The site sits in flat pasture on the western side of the Laney River valley at Bawnmore, a townland whose name reflects the Irish bán mór, meaning large grassy plain or large field, which fits the landscape well. Stone pairs like these are thought by some researchers to have had an astronomical or ritual function, their alignments possibly keyed to solar or lunar events, though no consensus has been reached. What is clear is that someone, several thousand years ago, selected and raised these two particular stones with deliberate care and a specific orientation in mind.

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