Stone row, Gneeves, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Stone row, Gneeves, Co. Cork

Three stones stand in a pasture on the north-facing slope of the Duvglasha River valley in north Cork, and the care with which they were placed is still legible after several thousand years.

They form a stone row, a prehistoric monument type found across Munster and consisting of standing stones set in a deliberate linear arrangement. What is quietly odd about this particular example is the way each stone has been positioned: rather than having their longest dimension running along the line, they are set transversely, so their length cuts across the row. The effect is a kind of deliberate perpendicularity, as if the builders were thinking as much about breadth as about direction.

The row runs east to west across a length of 8.3 metres, and the three stones diminish as you move westward, a graduated sequence that researchers of Irish stone rows, including Seán Ó Nualláin whose 1988 survey catalogued this site, have noted as a recurring pattern in the type. The tallest stone, at the eastern end, stands 2.3 metres high. The middle stone, 3.5 metres to its west, reaches 1.3 metres, and the westernmost stone, a further 3 metres along, stands 1 metre tall. A cairn, which in Irish archaeology typically refers to a mound of stones often covering a burial, lies roughly 35 metres to the south-south-east, suggesting this corner of the valley held some concentrated significance for the people who shaped it.

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