Standing stone, Glanballyma, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Glanballyma, Co. Kerry

In a pasture on a south-facing slope in Glanballyma, County Kerry, there may or may not be a standing stone.

That ambiguity is itself the point. A large, squat gallaun, the old Irish term for a standing stone, was recorded as sitting two fields south of a nearby ringfort and close to the river. Its shape, according to the description, resembled a rough chair. By 1985, when surveyors came looking, there was nothing to see. The landowner had no knowledge it had ever existed.

The stone's last confirmed mention comes from O'Connell, writing in 1938, who recorded both its location and the local explanation for how it got there. That explanation belongs to the Fenian cycle: Fionn Mac Cumhaill, the legendary warrior-giant of Irish mythology, is said to have thrown it from the top of a nearby hill. This kind of origin story is common across Ireland, where unusually placed or oddly shaped boulders are frequently attributed to Fionn's habit of lobbing rocks across the landscape. Whether the stone was buried, removed, or simply never where the tradition placed it, the 1985 survey could find no surface trace, and local memory had gone quiet on the subject entirely. What remains is a record of something that was believed to be there, shaped like a chair, thrown by a giant, and quietly lost to the pasture sometime in the decades between O'Connell's note and the surveyors' visit.

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Pete F
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