Standing stone (present location), Derrymihin, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone (present location), Derrymihin, Co. Cork

Most standing stones have stood in more or less the same spot for thousands of years, which is precisely what makes them useful as markers of prehistoric activity.

The one at Derrymihin, on the lower south-facing slopes of Maulin above Berehaven Harbour and Bere Island, has a slightly more complicated recent biography. Sometime after 1993, it was shifted roughly twenty metres to the south-west and repositioned along the southern boundary of its field during land reclamation works. It now sits in reclaimed pasture, a modest stone measuring half a metre across and just over a metre tall, occupying a place that is not quite where it originally stood.

The stone was first formally recorded in 1993, at which point it had a fixed location on the Sites and Monuments Record for County Cork. Standing stones of this kind are prehistoric in origin, erected for purposes that remain a matter of some debate among archaeologists, whether as territorial markers, ritual focal points, or astronomical indicators. What is certain is that moving one, even by a short distance, severs the spatial relationship between the monument and its original landscape context, the precise orientation, the sightlines, the relationship to surrounding features, all of which can carry meaning. The Derrymihin stone is still a real and recorded prehistoric monument, but it now has two locations in the record: where it was, and where it is.

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