Standing stone - pair, An Riasc, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone – pair, An Riasc, Co. Kerry

Two upright stones stand less than a metre apart on the southern shore of Smerwick Harbour, on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry.

They are not dramatic in the way of Stonehenge or Callanish; they sit quietly on low, marshy pastureland at An Riasc, aligned on a NNW-SSE axis, as if marking something that the landscape itself has long since forgotten. Paired standing stones of this kind are found across prehistoric Ireland, and while their precise purpose remains debated, they are generally thought to relate to ritual, territorial, or astronomical concerns. What gives this pair a particular quality is their plainness and their setting: the flat, somewhat waterlogged ground, the harbour nearby, and the absence of any obvious monument in the immediate vicinity.

The taller of the two stones occupies the south-east position and stands 1.9 metres high, 1.1 metres wide, and no more than 0.3 metres thick, a thin blade of stone rather than a bulky pillar. At its base, a large packing stone is still visible, the kind of practical detail that collapses thousands of years of distance into something surprisingly legible; someone wedged that stone in there to keep the upright steady, and it has not moved since. The north-west stone is slightly smaller, 1.6 metres high with a base measuring 0.9 by 0.4 metres. The two stones are set 0.95 metres apart. These measurements were recorded as part of the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, published by J. Cuppage in 1986, which documented a peninsula that contains one of the highest concentrations of archaeological monuments anywhere in Ireland.

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