Stone row, Fanahy, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Stone row, Fanahy, Co. Cork

At the southern foot of Miskish mountain in west Cork, a row of three prehistoric standing stones sits in level pasture, only one of them still upright.

The surviving stone reaches 2.5 metres in height, a modest but solid presence. The other two lie where they fell, measuring over two and three metres in length respectively, their bulk hinting at what the alignment would once have looked like when all three stood together.

Stone rows are among the more quietly puzzling monuments of prehistoric Ireland and Britain, alignments of two or more upright stones whose original purpose remains uncertain, with theories ranging from astronomical sighting lines to territorial or ceremonial markers. This particular row appears to have run along a northeast to southwest axis, an orientation shared by many similar monuments across Munster. One of the two fallen stones came down in 1969, a recent enough event to be recorded precisely, though the third had presumably been prostrate for considerably longer. The site was catalogued by Seán Ó Nualláin, whose systematic survey of Irish stone rows, published in 1988, placed this example at number 44 in his corpus and provided the measurements that give the monument its only detailed documentation.

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