Stone sculpture - iconic (present location), Dublin South City, Co. Dublin

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Stone sculpture – iconic (present location), Dublin South City, Co. Dublin

Somewhere along the way, two ancient stone heads acquired glass eyes.

That detail alone sets these objects apart from most Iron Age survivals: carved slightly larger than life-size, possibly representing a male and a female figure, they arrived at the National Museum of Ireland after a period spent in considerably less formal surroundings, namely a farmyard in County Wexford. The contrast between their presumed prehistoric origins and that mundane resting place is a reminder of how casually extraordinary things can be absorbed into everyday rural life.

The heads are recorded together as a pair, catalogued separately but clearly related. One carries a whistle-hole, a small deliberate perforation that provides the key dating evidence, placing it within the Iron Age tradition of European stone head carving, a practice associated with Celtic cultures across a broad stretch of the continent and evident in Ireland from roughly the last few centuries before the common era. The glass pupils inserted into both heads are a later addition, the work of someone who evidently felt the faces needed animating, or perhaps found the blank stone sockets unsettling. The original farmyard location has been linked to a site in County Wexford, suggesting the heads were moved, possibly more than once, before eventually being catalogued by researchers including Roche in 1986 and Moore in 1996.

The heads are now held at the National Museum of Ireland, whose principal archaeology collections are displayed at Kildare Street in Dublin city centre. The museum's collections include a substantial body of prehistoric material, and stone heads of this type, though rare, occasionally appear alongside metalwork and other Iron Age objects. Visiting with a specific interest in the heads means consulting the museum's collections in advance, as not everything in a national collection is on permanent public display at any given time. The Wexford farmyard where the heads once sat is noted in the archaeological record but is not itself a visitor site.

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