Gallaun, Derreennagreer, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Stone Monuments

Gallaun, Derreennagreer, Co. Kerry

Some places earn their place on the map by what they contain.

This one earns it by what it has lost. The Ordnance Survey's first edition mapped a gallaun at Derreennagreer, a term for a standing stone, one of the solitary upright pillars that appear across Kerry and the wider southwest, sometimes marking ancient boundaries, sometimes graves, sometimes purposes that have long since ceased to be legible. The stone was noted again on the OS Fair Plan. But when archaeologists went looking, there was nothing there.

The site sits in boggy pasture on the western side of the Blackwater valley, beneath the steep eastern slopes of Faher mountain. It is exactly the kind of place where a standing stone might plausibly have stood for millennia and then quietly disappeared, absorbed into a field boundary, broken up for building material, or simply swallowed by the soft ground over time. A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, compiling their archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press in 1996, recorded the absence plainly: no trace survives. The landscape itself is unremarkable to look at now, a wet pasture tucked into a valley, but the cartographic ghost of the gallaun gives the place an odd kind of presence, the outline of something that was once considered worth recording and is now gone entirely.

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