Standing stone - pair, Coumaraglinmountain, Co. Waterford

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone – pair, Coumaraglinmountain, Co. Waterford

On the western slope of Coumaraglinmountain in County Waterford, two modest standing stones sit roughly eleven metres apart, oriented along a NNW-SSE axis as if quietly in conversation. Neither is especially tall, the northern stone reaching just under eighty centimetres and its southern companion a little over eighty-five, yet their careful placement relative to one another and to the upper Araglin river valley below suggests an arrangement that was never accidental. Standing stones set in pairs like this are a recognised prehistoric monument type in Ireland, thought in most cases to date from the Bronze Age, though the purposes behind their positioning remain a matter of scholarly debate.

The two stones occupy the edge of cultivated land, with the Araglin river running close by to both the north and the west, about two hundred metres in each direction. Both have subrectangular cross-sections and are of broadly similar dimensions, though the southern stone has had a rather more eventful recent history. At some point in the nineteenth century it was folded into a field wall, a fate that befell many prehistoric monuments during the intense agricultural reorganisation of that era. It has since been recognised as a protected monument, sitting alongside its northern companion once more. The valley setting, broad and oriented NE-SW, frames the pair in a landscape that would have been meaningful to whoever erected them, though precisely what that meaning was remains, as with so many such sites, an open question.

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