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

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Stone Monuments

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

On a tract of partially reclaimed moorland along the eastern side of the Keel River valley in mid-Cork, a small prehistoric stone circle sits in a state of dignified incompleteness.

Six of its upright stones still stand, with five of them curving in an arc to the east, tracing what may once have been a ring of eleven or perhaps thirteen orthostats, the term used for the upright slabs that form such a monument's skeleton. The surviving stones are modest in scale, none taller than a metre, and the internal diameter of the circle runs to only around four and a half metres, making this a relatively intimate structure. What gives the site its particular character is not the circle alone but the arrangement around it: a fosse, or ditch, roughly sixty centimetres deep and up to two and a half metres wide, encircles the monument, bringing the total diameter from outer rim to outer rim to about ten metres. Faint traces of an external bank survive beyond that. Two additional pillar-like stones appear in the vicinity, one placed along the outer face of the fosse and a second lying roughly eight metres to the south-east, suggesting the site was once more elaborate than what remains.

What makes this stretch of moorland especially worth noting is its density of prehistoric remains. A wedge tomb, a type of megalithic burial monument common in the west and south of Ireland and typically dating to the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age, stands just a hundred metres to the south. A pair of standing stones lies roughly two hundred and fifty metres to the north-east, and a radial-stone enclosure, a monument type in which stones are arranged like the spokes of a wheel, sits around three hundred and fifty metres further in the same direction. These are not isolated curiosities but components of what appears to have been a significant ritual or ceremonial landscape, laid out across this valley floor during prehistory and now only partially legible beneath the recovered moorland surface. The central pit visible within the circle is, by contrast, modern in origin and adds nothing to the prehistoric record.

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