Stone row, Scartbaun, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
Three standing stones on a south-facing slope in West Cork do not announce themselves.
They are modest in height, the tallest reaching only 1.5 metres, and the entire row stretches less than four metres from end to end. Yet their placement is deliberate and precise, aligned along a northeast-southwest axis on a level shelf of ground above the course of the Durrus river, also known as the Four Mile Water. That alignment is the thing that lifts them out of the ordinary: prehistoric stone rows in Ireland are rarely accidental in their orientation, and this one belongs to a tradition of monument-building that archaeologists have traced across the Cork and Kerry landscape for several thousand years.
The row consists of three stones spaced at short but unequal intervals. The northeastern stone, standing 1.15 metres high, is followed roughly half a metre to the southwest by a slightly shorter stone at 0.95 metres. The third and tallest stone stands a further 0.7 metres beyond that, at 1.5 metres high and a metre in length. This pattern, in which the stones increase in height along the row toward the southwest, is a feature noted at a number of Cork stone rows and has led some researchers to suggest the monuments may have had an astronomical or ritual function, though what exactly was practised at sites like this one remains genuinely unknown. The site was catalogued by Seán Ó Nualláin in 1988 as part of a systematic survey of prehistoric stone rows across Munster, work that helped bring dozens of such modest but significant monuments to wider attention.