Standing stone - pair, Toom, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone – pair, Toom, Co. Cork

Two small standing stones in a field above the Blackwater river are easy to overlook, and that is precisely what makes them worth a moment's attention.

They are not tall or dramatically shaped; the larger of the pair reaches less than a metre in height. What lifts them out of the ordinary is their arrangement: set roughly 1.7 metres apart along a northeast-to-southwest alignment, they form what archaeologists classify as a paired standing stone monument, a configuration found at several sites across Munster and generally associated with prehistoric, possibly Bronze Age, ritual activity. The overall spread of the two stones across the ground runs to 3.8 metres.

The site sits on flat pasture on the eastern side of a low hill that slopes down toward the Blackwater, one of the longer rivers in Ireland, which would have been a significant landscape feature for any community living along its valley. The precise northeast-to-southwest orientation shared by many such paired stones across the region has prompted long debate among archaeologists: some read astronomical significance into it, connecting the alignment to the rising or setting sun at key points in the seasonal calendar, though no firm consensus exists. The dimensions recorded by the archaeologist Seán Ó Nualláin in 1988 are modest, the northeast stone measuring 0.85 metres in length, 0.55 metres in thickness, and 0.8 metres in height, while the southwest stone is marginally larger at 1.1 metres in length, 0.6 metres thick, and 0.9 metres high. Modest as they are, the stones have clearly been placed with deliberate care relative to one another and to the slope behind them.

Rated 0 out of 5

Visitor Notes

Review type for post source and places source type not found
Added by
Picture of Pete F
Pete F
IrishHistory.com is passionate about helping people discover and connect with the rich stories of their local communities.
Please use the form below to submit any photos you may have of Standing stone – pair, Toom, Co. Cork. We're happy to take any suggested edits you may have too. Please be advised it will take us some time to get to these submissions. Thank you.
Name
Email
Message
Upload images/documents
Maximum file size: 100 MB
If you'd like to add an image or a PDF please do it here.

Advertisement