Anomalous stone group, Bray, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Stone Monuments

Anomalous stone group, Bray, Co. Kerry

At the south-western tip of Valentia Island, where the land narrows toward the entrance of Portmagee Channel, three stones sit in an arrangement that has puzzled those who have tried to classify it.

Two stand upright, one lies as a large flat slab, and together they do not quite fit any of the standard prehistoric categories, which is precisely why they are recorded under the blunt label "anomalous stone group". The second edition of the Ordnance Survey maps marked the site as "Gallauns", an Anglicisation of the Irish "gallán", meaning a standing stone or pillar, though the term here is applied loosely to what is clearly something more complicated.

The two standing stones are spaced 10.5 metres apart and orientated on different axes, which is one of the details that makes the grouping difficult to read as a single coherent monument. The taller of the pair reaches 1.7 metres, aligned roughly north-north-west to south-south-east, and leans slightly westward. The second, at 1.5 metres, runs east to west, and at its base a number of packing stones are still visible, the small wedged fragments used to stabilise an upright when it was first set in the ground. A further 8.2 metres to the west, a large slab measuring 2.6 by 1.3 metres has been set on its edge and appears to have formed the rear wall of an animal shelter at some point, suggesting that whatever the original purpose of these stones, they were later pressed into more practical service. Whether the slab was always part of the group, or was moved into position long after the standing stones were raised, is not clear. The relationship between the three elements remains genuinely unresolved, which is how the site came to be catalogued not as a stone row, a pair, or a portal tomb, but simply as something that does not fit neatly elsewhere.

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