Stone row, Pluckanes, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Stone row, Pluckanes, Co. Cork

Two of the three prehistoric standing stones that once formed a row beside Fiddler's Brook in Pluckanes are now gate pillars.

That sentence, when the full picture comes into focus, says rather a lot about how ancient monuments fare when they become inconvenient. At some point before 1913, two of the three upright stones in this Bronze Age alignment were levered out of the ground and repurposed as gateposts at a farm entrance roughly thirty metres to the north. The Ordnance Survey recorded the fact in 1933, noting that the removal had happened around twenty years prior. The eastern gate pillar survives, measuring 1.2 metres high, its prehistoric origins reduced to an agricultural utility.

Stone rows, sometimes called megalithic alignments, are a recurring feature of the Cork and Kerry landscape. They consist of between two and six upright stones set in a roughly straight line, and though their precise purpose remains debated, they are generally assigned to the Bronze Age. The Pluckanes row was originally composed of three stones aligned approximately north-northeast to south-southwest, spanning about 7.6 metres in total length. The largest of the three, the northeasternmost, stood 3.2 metres tall and measured 2.1 metres along its base. A 1910 record still shows the second stone standing, at around 2.4 metres high. By 1938, the Ordnance Survey six-inch map depicted only a pair of stones in or beside a field fence. The tallest surviving stone, still incorporated into that fence, fell in 1996. Roughly 75 metres to the west-southwest, a five-stone circle once stood in the same stretch of level pasture, hinting that this was once a more substantial concentration of prehistoric activity in the landscape.

The site sits on the western side of Fiddler's Brook, in flat grazing land. The northeastern stone, though fallen, remains in the fence line, and the repurposed gate pillar to the north offers a quietly odd footnote for anyone who makes it out here and looks carefully enough.

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