Stone circle - multiple-stone, Glantane, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
Tucked into a small copse beside a farmstead on the east side of the Keel River valley in mid Cork, this eleven-stone circle arranges itself according to a logic that prehistoric communities repeated across the Cork and Kerry landscape: the upright stones, or orthostats, graduate deliberately in height, tallest at the entrance and shortest at the axial stone opposite.
That axial stone, a low recumbent slab set between two flanking uprights, is the defining feature of the Cork-Kerry stone circle tradition, and its orientation here along a north-north-east to south-south-west axis is consistent with alignments observed across dozens of comparable monuments in the region, many of which appear to have been laid out with reference to lunar or solar events on the horizon.
The circle is modest in scale, measuring 5.1 metres along its main internal axis, and the individual orthostats range from roughly half a metre to just over a metre in length and between half a metre and just under a metre in height. One stone has shifted from its original position and now lies immediately south of the axial stone rather than standing beside it. Whether this displacement is ancient or more recent is unclear, but it does not obscure the overall coherence of the monument. The site was documented by Seán Ó Nualláin in 1984 as part of his systematic survey of Cork stone circles, a body of work that remains the foundational reference for understanding this distinctive regional monument type.
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