Standing stone - pair, Curraghawaddra, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
One of two standing stones on a bog-covered hillside in Curraghawaddra has long since given up its vertical ambitions.
The northeast stone now lies flat, measuring an impressive 4.3 metres in length by 1.4 metres wide and 0.6 metres thick, a considerable slab of stone made all the more conspicuous by the open, waterlogged ground around it. Its companion, 1.8 metres to the southwest, still stands, rising 2.4 metres out of a townland boundary fence, though it is noticeably narrower and slimmer than the fallen giant beside it. The two were apparently set in alignment along an ENE-WSW axis, a deliberate orientation that places them within a broader tradition of prehistoric paired standing stones found across Munster.
The site sits close to the headwaters of the Glashagarriff River, and a boulder-burial, a form of prehistoric funerary monument in which a large capstone rests on smaller support stones over a burial, lies just one metre to the southwest of the standing pair. That proximity is unlikely to be coincidental. Researcher Seán Ó Nualláin catalogued the site in 1988, and it appears in the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork published in 1997. The association of standing stones with burial monuments is well attested in the prehistoric landscape of southwest Ireland, suggesting this small cluster of features once formed part of a more deliberate arrangement, even if the full extent of that arrangement is now obscured beneath centuries of accumulated bog.