Stone row, Lyradane, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Stone row, Lyradane, Co. Cork

On a north-facing pasture slope in Lyradane, County Cork, there was once a prehistoric stone row, a type of monument consisting of two or more standing stones set in a deliberate linear arrangement.

There is nothing to see there now. The stones have been removed, and the ground shows no visible trace of what once stood. The site exists today almost entirely as a clerical fact.

What makes the absence stranger is how long the feature persisted on paper. Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from 1842, 1904, and 1938 all marked the location, labelling it as a 'Cromlech', a term historically applied rather loosely to various megalithic structures. By the time the archaeologists Ruairí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin visited and recorded the site in 1982, there were still two stones standing in a north-south line, roughly a metre apart. The first measured approximately 0.65 metres in length, 0.25 metres in thickness, and stood about a metre tall; the second was slightly broader and a little taller at 1.1 metres. A third stone lay prostrate on the ground, around 1.45 metres to the west of the southern standing stone. That survey, published in 1982, captured what was evidently a monument already reduced from whatever its original form had been. At some point after that record was made, even those remnants disappeared.

The Lyradane stone row is a reminder that prehistoric monuments in the Irish landscape exist on a spectrum from the well-preserved to the entirely erased, and that the erasure is often quiet and undramatic, happening field by field, generation by generation, with no single moment of destruction to point to.

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Pete F
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