Stone row, Ardrah, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Stone row, Ardrah, Co. Cork

Four prehistoric standing stones occupy a natural platform on the northern side of the Mealagh river valley in Ardrah, Co. Cork, arranged in a line that runs roughly northeast to southwest.

What makes the row quietly arresting is the deliberate graduation in height: the tallest stone, at the southwestern end, rises to 2.3 metres, while the others step down progressively toward the northeast, the smallest standing only 0.75 metres. The overall span is just 4.8 metres, making this a compact but carefully composed monument of the kind found across Cork and Kerry, where stone rows, typically consisting of between two and six uprights, seem to have been laid out with some attention to alignment and proportion.

The row was documented by Seán Ó Nualláin in 1988, whose survey of Cork and Kerry stone rows remains a key reference for these monuments. The spacing between the stones is irregular but close, ranging from 0.25 metres to 0.9 metres, and each stone varies in length and thickness as well as height, suggesting that naturally occurring slabs were selected and placed rather than dressed to a uniform shape. A detail recorded by Myler in 1998 adds a note of loss to the site: a fifth stone, positioned in the northeast corner of the field and bearing small spiral markings, was at some point removed, most likely during agricultural field clearance. Carved spirals of this kind are relatively rare on standing stones in Ireland, and their disappearance here means that whatever additional layer of meaning or decoration the monument once carried is now gone entirely.

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