Standing stone - pair, Trawnamaddree, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone – pair, Trawnamaddree, Co. Cork

One of these two standing stones no longer stands.

At Trawnamaddree in west Cork, in the river basin of the Owvane, a pair of prehistoric stones sit in open pasture near the south-eastern foot of a mountain ridge. One remains upright, modest in scale at 1.35 metres high. The other, a considerably larger stone measuring 3.3 metres in length, now lies flat on the ground, and has done so for some time.

How long it has been down is a matter of some precision, at least in one direction. The Ordnance Survey Name Book of 1896 recorded the fallen stone as still upright at that point, which means it toppled sometime after the late nineteenth century, most likely through a combination of ground movement, agricultural activity, or simple gravity acting on an inadequately anchored base. Paired standing stones of this kind are a recurring feature of the prehistoric landscape of Cork and Kerry, typically associated with the Bronze Age, though the exact purposes they served remain a matter of interpretation: alignment with celestial events, territorial markers, and ritual functions have all been proposed. What is clear is that the two stones at Trawnamaddree were deliberately placed in relation to one another, and that their setting in a river basin, sheltered by rising ground to the north-west, was almost certainly intentional. The site was recorded by archaeologist Seán Ó Nualláin in 1988, as part of his systematic survey of stone pairs across the region.

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