Stone row, Coolacoosane, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Stone row, Coolacoosane, Co. Cork

Three standing stones on a rocky ridge above the Laney River valley do not, at first glance, look like much.

But the alignment at Coolacoosane belongs to a category of prehistoric monument found scattered across the uplands of Munster, where Bronze Age communities erected small rows of standing stones, typically aligned along a single axis, for purposes that remain genuinely unclear. Ritual, calendrical, territorial, funerary; none of these explanations has been conclusively settled, which gives sites like this one an unresolved quality that more legible monuments lack.

The row stretches 5.6 metres overall, oriented roughly NNE to SSW, and sits on a flat shoulder at the end of a rocky ridge on a north-east-facing slope. The three stones are not uniform. The north-easternmost leans to the west and stands around 1.2 metres high; the middle stone leans in the opposite direction and is the tallest of the three at roughly 1.45 metres. The south-westernmost is noticeably shorter, only about 0.4 metres, and sits considerably out of line with the other two. Its top appears to be broken, which may explain the discrepancy in height, though whether it was always the smallest or has simply suffered more over the centuries is an open question. The arrangement was recorded and catalogued by Seán Ó Nualláin in 1988 as part of his systematic survey of Cork stone rows, a body of work that brought dozens of these quiet, often overlooked monuments into the archaeological record.

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