Standing stone - pair, Kilmore By.), Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone – pair, Kilmore By.), Co. Cork

Two modest standing stones in a grove of fir trees in Kilmore, West Cork, would be easy to walk past without a second thought.

Neither is especially tall; the south-western stone reaches one metre in height, the north-eastern just 0.7 metres, and the gap between them is only 1.1 metres. Yet their placement is deliberate, the pair aligned along a north-east to south-west axis in a way that recurs again and again across the prehistoric landscape of Munster, suggesting a shared intention, perhaps calendrical, perhaps ceremonial, that still eludes complete explanation.

Paired standing stones of this kind are a recognised feature of the Cork and Kerry landscape, catalogued and studied most thoroughly by Seán Ó Nualláin, whose 1988 survey documented this particular pair as number 138 in his sequence. The stones sit on rolling pasture, sheltered within their fir grove, and are compact rather than monumental; the overall length of the arrangement, from one stone to the other, is just 2.6 metres. What gives the site additional interest is a third stone standing approximately 90 metres to the north-east, a solitary upright recorded separately. Whether that outlier relates directly to the pair, or represents an independent act of monument-building on the same ground, is not resolved by the available evidence. The clustering of prehistoric stones in a single townland is not unusual in West Cork, where the density of such monuments points to sustained and organised activity across many centuries of the Bronze Age.

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