One aspect that Our City, Our Town has dabbled in is the archaeology of the Lee valley, the human artifacts of a past age now long gone and all very much part of forgotten histories and memories. Only for the monument to exist, insights into the society that constructed them would disappear forever.We now live though in an era where the stature of the monument is important but we know very little about its reason for construction and its associated cultural meanings.

Patsy Regan at Agharinagh Stone Row, Dripsey, Autumn 2007. (Picture: Kieran McCarthy).

Many of the local residents I have met in my travels in the valley had limited knowledge of what era their local archaeological monuments were from and their general function in society. Many of the sites are kept because they have been there so long. Many of the sites I encountered are deemed mysterious entities that local people do not want to mess with or engage with. I have heard a myriad of bad luck stories that have been passed down through generations.

Patsy Regan was my first guide to introduce me to the earliest of Inniscarra Parish's monuments, a stone row, in Agharinagh townland, Dripsey. The row comprised five stones measuring a metre and a half on average in height, possibly dating to Bronze Age Ireland, c.5,000 years ago. Two of the stones have collapsed whilst three remain upright in three slots in the ground packed by smaller stones at the base. The stone is of limestone composition, which is not a common stone in this sandstone region. It has a north- south alignment and is located on a western facing hill, 130 feet over sea level. Standing stones and stone rows are part of the ritual tradition, identity and power structures of Bronze Age societies. It is known generally Bronze Age people lived in thatch like cabins cooking over fulacht fias.

Patsy, originally from Mawmore between Bandon and Iniskeen, dabbles in researching the past. Patsy, a farmer, has a deep and particular interest in the land, its geology its shapes and form. His farmhouse overlooked the Dripsey River as it made its final journey towards Inniscarra Reservoir. We walked the land and could see how glaciation as well as the elements had eroded into the underlining sandstone rock. In terms of human monuments, the stone row he brought me to is not marked on the current ordnance survey map. Many of them are but this was an exception to the rule. From the map and the County Archaeological inventory for mid Cork, stone rows are not as common in this region as standing stones and fulacht fia sites, which are abundantly marked on the map.

Archaeological monuments are what are deemed material culture. They are tangible elements of the past plus they are the only aspects left of a constructed ritual. The fact that stone rows like that in Agharinagh have persisted for five thousand years speaks volumes on how society passes its heritage from one generation to another. Even if one thinks of how those monuments not only in our present time but in other 'presents' as well if one could say that. Some of these monuments could also have been re-used in other times.

Human monuments from any era are a way we expressed ourselves in the past. They are signs, signposts and symbols. In terms of prehistory they are an expression of a community that we deem long since disappeared. Through the passing of time all that is left is a by-product of a long forgotten culture. The only link is that they are people still living and farming in the area – continuity for 5,000 years. With landscape and human and cultural evolution one is dealing with vast tracts of time. Even the epoch of the Bronze Age, archaeologists have allotted a time to it based on excavation work and the introduction and use of Bronze– 1,500 years (c.2,500 B.C-c.500 B.C). through to the introduction of iron.