Standing stone, Slieveowen, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Slieveowen, Co. Cork

On a south-west-facing slope in the Slieveowen area of County Cork, there is a field that once held a standing stone and now holds nothing at all.

The stone is gone, removed around 1977 according to local information, leaving behind only a name on older maps and a faint rectangular absence in the archaeological record.

What makes this site quietly interesting is the gap in the cartographic evidence. When Ordnance Survey teams walked this part of Cork in 1842 and produced their six-inch maps, no stone was recorded here. By 1904, a revised survey showed it clearly, a single upright stone in a field known as Parkeenagallaun, a name that appears to preserve the Irish word for a small enclosure or plot. Standing stones are among the more enigmatic monuments in the Irish landscape; they are generally associated with the Bronze Age, though their precise purposes, boundary markers, ritual focal points, burial indicators, remain matters of interpretation rather than certainty. Whether this particular stone was ancient and simply missed by the 1842 surveyors, or whether it had been re-erected or repositioned at some point between the two surveys, is not known. What the two maps together confirm is that it stood in pasture on that sloping ground for at least the first three quarters of the twentieth century before disappearing from the field altogether.

There is nothing to see at the site today. The field name Parkeenagallaun, if it survives in local use at all, is probably the only trace remaining of whatever the stone once marked.

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Pete F
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