Stone circle - multiple-stone, Breeny More, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Stone circle – multiple-stone, Breeny More, Co. Cork

What draws attention at Breeny More is not the scale of the circle itself but what sits inside it.

Four boulder-burials, a form of Bronze Age funerary monument in which a large capstone is laid over a low kerb of smaller stones to cover a burial, are arranged in a regular group within the interior. That clustering is unusual; boulder-burials are more often encountered as solitary features in the landscape, and to find four grouped together within the bounds of a single stone circle makes Breeny More a genuinely rare combination of monument types.

The circle occupies a natural platform on a north-west-facing slope above the Owvane river valley in west Cork. What survives above ground is not a full ring of upright stones but two entrance stones and a single axial stone, the low recumbent slab placed opposite the entrance that is characteristic of Cork and Kerry's multiple-stone circles. The internal measurement along the main axis, aligned north-east to south-west, is approximately fourteen metres. Two further slabs lie flat on the perimeter and may originally have stood upright as orthostats, stones set vertically into the ground to form the circuit of the circle, before being displaced at some point. The site was catalogued by Seán Ó Nualláin in 1984 and discussed by Roberts in 1988, placing it within a well-studied regional tradition of recumbent stone circles concentrated in the south-west of Ireland.

The monument sits in pasture and is a National Monument in State Care, so the land around it remains agricultural. The platform setting means the circle has a degree of elevation above the valley floor, and the north-westerly aspect would have given those who built it a clear outlook across the Owvane valley, whatever significance that orientation held for them.

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