page_title: Axial stone circle
section_title: Developments in characterising the structures
hierarchical_section_title: Axial stone circle / Developments in characterising the structures
caption_attribution_description: English: The recumbent stone In the Stone Circle in Midmar churchyard.
context_page_description: An axial stone circle is a megalithic ring of stones of a particular design found in County Cork and County Kerry in southwest Ireland. Archaeologists have found it convenient to consider the axial five-stone circle and axial multiple-stone circle separately. The circle has an approximate axis of symmetry aligned in a generally northeast–southwest direction. The stone at the southwest side of the circle, rather than being an upright orthostat like all the rest, is a slab lying horizontally with its long thin edge along the circumference of the ring. Because it marks the axis of the circle it is called the axial stone.
  Constructed in the Bronze Age, axial stone circles have an odd number of stones with two stones placed on either side of where the axis crosses the northeast side of the ring. The pair of uprights is generally taller that any of the others and they frame what is sometimes regarded as the entrance, or portal, to the ring. For this reason these two stones are called portal stones.
context_section_description: Somerville (1909) first reported that the axis of Drombeg stone circle aligned with the setting of the sun at midwinter over the axial stone. He noted this stone had been deliberately laid in an orientation along its long edge and it had not merely fallen like this. He called the structure a recumbent stone circle because of a perceived similarity with stone circles in northeast Scotland which by that time had been carefully surveyed by Frederick Coles. The similarities are that the recumbent stone lies lengthways along the southwest circumference of the circle and there are two orthostats (upright stones) taller than the rest. In Scotland the recumbent stone is a massive block and the two tallest stones, "flankers", stand at each end of it. In Ireland, however, the recumbent stone is a somewhat thin slab, quite modest in size, and Ó Nualláin regarded it as lying "upright". In Ireland the tall orthostats lie opposite to the recumbent stone and not beside it, so, seeking a name to differentiate the Irish stone circles, Ó Nualláin called them "Cork–Kerry stone circles" and the stone to the southwest he called the "axial stone". 
  Ó Nualláin studied 88 circles with axial stones and recognised two different types according to the number of stones in the ring. Forty-three circles had five stones ("five-stone circles") and forty-five had seven or more stones ("multiple-stone circles"). The latter have up to nineteen stones but they mostly have nine, eleven or thirteen. Those with multiple stones bear a greater similarity to the recumbent stone circles of Scotland.
caption: Scotland: Recumbent and flanker stones at Midmar Kirk recumbent stone circle
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