Gallauns, Clash, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Stone Monuments
Sometimes the most telling thing about a place is what is no longer there.
To the east of Killarney, in ordinary pastureland, two standing stones were marked on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1846 under the name "Gallauns", the Irish term for upright stones, typically prehistoric in origin and often associated with burial, boundary-marking, or ritual alignment. Today, no visible trace of either stone remains.
The 1846 mapping gives us a fixed point: the stones were present, or at least remembered, at the time of that great mid-nineteenth-century surveying effort, when OS teams moved systematically across Ireland recording field monuments alongside townland names and landscape features. Whether the gallauns had already fallen, been removed, or were reduced to stumps by that point is unclear, but someone knew they were there and considered them worth naming. What happened between that moment of inscription and the present absence is unrecorded. They may have been cleared for agriculture, broken up for building material, or simply swallowed by centuries of land use. The townland name Clash offers no obvious clue.