Standing stone - pair, Shehy Beg, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone – pair, Shehy Beg, Co. Cork

One of these stones is still standing.

The other has been swallowed, more or less, by the mountain. On a bog-covered ridge near the summit of Shehy Beg in West Cork, a pair of prehistoric standing stones sit roughly 3.6 metres apart, one upright and one prostrate, the fallen stone partly concealed beneath accumulated peat. That gradual burial is itself a kind of record, the bog preserving what it also hides, and the exposed measurements of the prone stone, at least 4.6 metres long and nearly a metre wide, suggest something once considerably more imposing than its current state implies.

Paired standing stones of this kind are a recognised feature of the Irish prehistoric landscape, particularly in Munster, where they are sometimes associated with stone rows or burial sites, though the specific function of any individual pair remains a matter of reasonable disagreement among archaeologists. The Shehy Beg pair sits at around 350 metres north-west of the mountain's summit, which rises to 1,284 feet, placing the stones in an exposed upland position that was evidently considered significant by whoever erected them, presumably in the Bronze Age. The standing stone, the smaller of the two at 2.2 metres high, gives a sense of the original arrangement, while its fallen companion, broader and considerably longer, hints at a monument that would have read very differently against the skyline before the peat took hold.

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