Stone row, Arda Mór, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Stone row, Arda Mór, Co. Kerry

On a west-facing slope above the Lispole valley in County Kerry, three standing stones are arranged in a line that points, with apparent deliberateness, towards the setting sun on the winter solstice.

The alignment stretches 7.55 metres from end to end, with the tallest stone at the north-east reaching three metres in height, and the two south-westerly stones slightly shorter but still substantial. Views from the site extend westward as far as the Blasket Islands, which gives some sense of how exposed and purposefully placed this hillside position is. What makes the arrangement stranger still is a fourth stone, an outlier, standing 60 metres to the north-east and set apart from the others entirely.

That outlier is the most arresting element of the site. Nearly three metres tall and oriented east-north-east to west-south-west, its north-west face is covered in prehistoric rock art: cup-marks and ring motifs carved into the stone's surface. Cup-and-ring marks are among the most common forms of Neolithic and Bronze Age rock art found across Atlantic Europe, consisting of a shallow circular depression surrounded by one or more incised rings, sometimes with channels or radial lines cut outward from the centre. On this particular stone, the carvings include a cup-mark enclosed within two concentric circles positioned centrally on the face, two further cup-and-circle combinations below it, and a cluster near the base featuring radial lines and one incomplete circle, alongside seven plain cup-marks and a series of linear grooves. The combination of so many motifs on a single face, within the context of a stone alignment, is unusual in itself. More remarkable is what once stood nearby: immediately north-west of the outlier, a large boulder supported on three smaller stones was removed at some point to make way for a track. Local knowledge describes the arrangement, and the archaeological interpretation is that it was almost certainly a boulder-dolmen, a type of simple megalithic tomb in which a large capstone rests on uprights. As researcher Ó Nualláin noted, boulder-dolmens are sometimes found near isolated standing stones or pairs of stones, but none had previously been recorded in direct association with a stone row alignment. Whatever was once a coherent prehistoric complex here, one component of it was quietly demolished for a farm track, and is now gone.

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