Stone circle - multiple-stone, Currabeha, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Stone circle – multiple-stone, Currabeha, Co. Cork

A small block of quartz stands alone inside a stone circle on a south-east-facing slope of the Bride River valley in mid-Cork.

It is not the largest stone on the site, not the most structurally significant, and yet it is the detail that quietly refuses to be explained away. Quartz was deliberately placed at prehistoric monuments across Ireland, almost certainly for reasons that went beyond the purely functional, but whatever meaning it held here has long since dissolved into the pasture around it.

The circle at Currabeha is a multiple-stone type, a category of monument found predominantly in Cork and Kerry, typically characterised by a larger number of uprights than the better-known five-stone circles of the region, and usually orientated along a significant astronomical axis. This example may originally have comprised thirteen stones; ten remain upright and three have fallen flat. The surviving orthostats, the individual standing slabs, range from 0.5 metres to 1.4 metres in height, and the internal diameter along the main axis, aligned roughly north-north-east to south-south-west, measures 8.8 metres. The quartz block, 0.6 metres high, sits just east of that central axis. Séan Ó Nualláin, who catalogued Cork and Kerry stone circles extensively in the 1980s, recorded this site in a 1984 survey. A second multiple-stone circle stands roughly 320 metres to the north-north-west, which makes Currabeha part of a loose pairing, an arrangement not uncommon in this part of the country, though what relationship the two monuments had to one another in use or in meaning remains an open question.

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