Standing stone, Tullig, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
At the foot of the north-western slope of Musheramore, a hill in mid Cork, there is a field where a standing stone no longer stands.
The stone was removed around 1966, and what had once been a fixed point in the landscape, roughly one and a half metres tall, is simply gone. No marker replaces it, no hollow necessarily betrays where it sat.
What makes the absence stranger is that the stone appears to have been unrecorded by the Ordnance Survey teams who mapped the area in both 1842 and 1904. Standing stones are prehistoric upright slabs, set into the ground singly or in arrangements, and they survive across Ireland in considerable numbers, their original purposes debated but often associated with boundaries, burials, or ritual. This one, in pasture at Tullig, slipped through two separate surveys across more than sixty years of cartographic attention, and then disappeared physically within decades of the century that finally took notice of it. Whether it was genuinely missed by earlier surveyors or simply considered unremarkable at the time is not recorded.