Stone circle - five-stone, Bellmount, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Stone circle – five-stone, Bellmount, Co. Cork

On a low hill at Bellmount in mid-Cork, a small prehistoric stone circle sits in open pasture, damaged but not entirely undone.

What makes it notable is partly its condition and partly its context: another five-stone circle of the same type stands roughly 250 metres to the west-southwest, meaning two of these rare monuments occupy the same quiet ridge within sight of each other.

Five-stone circles are a distinctive Cork and Kerry tradition, consisting of four orthostats, upright standing stones, arranged in a rough oval, with a fifth, lower recumbent stone laid flat across the western end of the main axis. At Bellmount, that axis runs east to west, an alignment common to the type and generally understood to relate to solar or lunar observation. The circle is modest in scale, with an internal measurement of around three metres along its main axis, and the orthostats range from about 0.9 to 1.5 metres in length and up to 1.2 metres in height. Of the five stones, the two entrance stones and the southern side stone remain upright; the northern side stone has fallen, and the axial stone, the recumbent that would have anchored the western end, is shattered. Seán Ó Nualláin, who catalogued Cork's stone circles extensively in the 1980s, recorded this monument as number 73 in his 1984 survey, placing it within a broader pattern of paired or clustered five-stone circles in the region.

The presence of a second five-stone circle so close by is the detail that rewards attention here. Whether the two were built in the same period, by the same community, or intended to function together in some way is not established, but their proximity is unusual enough to suggest the landscape around Bellmount held particular significance during the Bronze Age.

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