Standing stone - pair, Eyeries, Co. Cork

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Standing stone – pair, Eyeries, Co. Cork

One of these two standing stones has a hole drilled clean through it, and that single detail raises more questions than the stones themselves answer.

The pair sit in level pasture on the southern side of Ballycrovane Harbour in West Cork, aligned along a north-north-east to south-south-west axis, separated by just over nineteen metres. The easterly stone, the taller of the two at 1.1 metres, carries a drilled hole roughly 3.5 metres in diameter, and the concave profile of its eastern face points to something more dramatic in its past: the evidence suggests that a substantial portion of the stone's east side sheared away at some point, altering whatever the original form looked like. The western stone is slightly smaller, standing 0.75 metres high and somewhat narrower.

Paired standing stones, a recurring feature of the prehistoric landscape in counties Cork and Kerry, are generally understood to date from the Bronze Age, though assigning precise dates or purposes to individual examples remains difficult. They are sometimes found in association with stone rows or other monuments, and alignment, whether astronomical, territorial, or ceremonial, is frequently proposed as a factor in their placement. What makes this particular pair unusual is that drilled perforation. Drilling through a standing stone is not a casual act, and the question of when it was done, and why, sits unresolved. It may be ancient, it may be relatively recent, perhaps connected to agricultural use or land clearance at some later period. The shearing of the eastern face complicates any reading of the original intent, since the hole as it now appears may be only part of what was once there.

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