Boulder-burial, An Bhinn Bhán, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Sites
On the western shore of Lough Currane in south Kerry, a flat-topped slab rests on three low stones in a quietly unremarkable patch of sloping pasture.
It is easy to walk past without pausing. But this small arrangement is a boulder-burial, a Bronze Age funerary monument in which a large capstone, here measuring roughly 1.8 metres by 1.5 metres and about 30 centimetres thick, is propped above the ground on supports to create a shallow covered space. The form is distinct from the more familiar portal tomb or dolmen, being lower and more compressed, almost flush with the earth. The interior has filled with field debris over the centuries, and larger clearance stones have been piled against it on the east and west sides by farmers working the surrounding land.
In 1988, excavation beneath the cover-stone turned up a single piece of burnt bone, a reminder that however modest this structure looks, it once served as a place of deliberate burial. About 13 metres to the north-east stands a stout standing stone, or gallaun as it is marked on Ordnance Survey maps, the Irish word simply meaning a single upright stone. It rises 2.4 metres and carries an unusual sharp inward angle on its north-east face at a height of around 1.45 metres, a feature noted by the archaeologist Seán Ó Nualláin in 1978. Packing stones at the base confirm it was set deliberately and with some care. A second standing stone lies roughly 167 metres to the south-south-west, suggesting this stretch of lakeshore once formed a more organised ceremonial or funerary landscape. The scholar Henry, writing in 1957, also recorded two small structures she called dolmens to the west of the standing stone, along with hut ruins and field boundaries. None of those features are now visible above ground.