Standing stone - pair, Na Millíní, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone – pair, Na Millíní, Co. Cork

Two upright stones standing just fifteen centimetres apart at their bases, pressed so close together that one of them leans against the rear wall of a farmhouse, do not look much like a pair of standing stones.

And that, in a sense, is the problem. Paired standing stones, as a monument class, are generally understood to be set at a meaningful distance from one another, oriented along a deliberate axis. This pair near the north bank of the Sullane River in Na Millíní, County Cork, breaks that expectation so thoroughly that archaeologists have been reluctant to classify them with any confidence at all.

The two stones are aligned roughly east-northeast to west-southwest, spanning just 0.85 metres in overall length. The larger of the pair, the one to the east-northeast, measures 0.45 metres by 0.2 metres and stands 1.15 metres tall, leaning slightly in the direction it faces. The western stone is narrower, at 0.25 metres by 0.12 metres, and a little taller at 1.22 metres, its upper section resting against the wall of an adjacent house in an area of rough pasture. Whether they were always this close together, or whether later construction and ground disturbance shifted them, is not recorded. What is noted is that their proximity is unusual enough to raise the possibility that these are not standing stones at all in the conventional sense, but rather the surviving remnants of a different kind of monument entirely, perhaps a stone row, a cist, or some other prehistoric structure now largely lost. Without excavation or further survey, that question stays open.

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