Standing stone, Coolroe, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Coolroe, Co. Kerry

Some monuments survive only as absences.

At Coolroe in County Kerry, the Ordnance Survey maps record a feature labelled 'Gallaun', the Irish term for a standing stone, a single upright stone set into the ground in prehistory, whose original purpose remains debated but which is often associated with burial, boundary-marking, or ritual. On the map it has a location, a name, a presence. On the ground, there is nothing.

The stone southwest of the river Behy has been lost to land reclamation, the gradual process by which boggy or marginal ground is drained, cleared, and converted to agricultural use. This kind of work, carried out extensively across Ireland over the past two centuries, transformed vast stretches of landscape that had previously preserved prehistoric features simply by being too wet or too poor to farm. The gallaun at Coolroe did not survive it. A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, compiling their archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula published by Cork University Press in 1996, confirmed that no trace remained at the recorded location.

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Pete F
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