Stone circle - multiple-stone, An Dromaid, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Stone circle – multiple-stone, An Dromaid, Co. Kerry

On the north-western slope of the Cummeragh river valley in south Kerry, a small oval of standing stones sits in rough pastureland without so much as a mark on the Ordnance Survey maps.

It overlooks Lough Currane to the south-west, and while the surrounding landscape has been worked and divided by generations of farmers, the monument has survived in a state that makes it genuinely difficult to read. The eastern side of the arrangement is defined not by upright stones but by field debris alone, and the interior has accumulated roughly half a metre of the same material. Even its classification carries a degree of uncertainty: this is recorded as a possible stone circle.

The arrangement is oval rather than round, with its longer axis running north-east to south-west. Five stones remain, though it may originally have comprised seven. The largest, standing at the western position, reaches two metres in height and is the most commanding of the group. To the south is an orthostat, a term for a large upright slab used in prehistoric construction, standing 1.8 metres high. At the north-east, one stone leans markedly outwards, and beside it a large boulder-like slab lies prostrate. The stone at the south-west is squat and block-like, quite different in character from its neighbours. In a typical Kerry multiple-stone circle, the arrangement of portal stones and a lower axial stone opposite them gives the monument a recognisable internal grammar; here, neither the portals nor the axial stone can be identified with any confidence. Adding a further layer of complexity, a bronze staff found elsewhere in the same townland was for a time incorrectly linked to this site by the archaeologist Ó Nualláin, writing in 1984. The association has since been corrected. Some 6.65 metres to the north-west, a single standing monolith has been incorporated into a field boundary wall. It stands 1.3 metres high and is described as being of regular elevation, suggesting it may once have had a more deliberate relationship to the circle itself.

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