Standing stone, Máistir Gaoithe, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Máistir Gaoithe, Co. Kerry

Some monuments are notable for what they reveal; this one is notable for what it conceals.

A standing stone once marked on Ordnance Survey maps at Máistir Gaoithe, on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, has effectively vanished. Recorded under the Irish term "gallaun", meaning a single upright stone, it was sited on the lower north-west facing slope of a ridge running down from Coomduff mountain. When archaeologists went to find it, it was gone, swallowed by forestry that has since blanketed the area.

The stone appears on both the first and second editions of the OS maps, which places its recorded existence somewhere across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but at some point between cartography and fieldwork it ceased to be findable. A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, compiling their archaeological survey of south Kerry for Cork University Press in 1996, could not locate it. Whether it was felled, buried under forestry operations, or simply overwhelmed by dense planting is unknown. What makes the situation stranger still is that less than a hundred metres upslope, a second standing stone survives. Two gallauns, positioned in proximity on the same ridge, suggest this was once a meaningful stretch of landscape, a corridor or marker point in a prehistoric arrangement that is now only partially legible.

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