Boulder-burial, Arda Mór, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Burial Sites
On a west-facing slope above the Lispole valley in County Kerry, there was once a large boulder balanced on three smaller stones, a prehistoric arrangement known as a boulder-dolmen.
It no longer exists. At some point after the prehistoric period, and recorded only through local memory, it was removed to make way for a track. What remains at Arda Mór is the broader complex around where it once stood: a stone alignment of three uprights stretching 7.55 metres, and a solitary outlier stone positioned some 60 metres to the north-east. The vanished dolmen would have sat immediately to the north-west of that outlier.
A boulder-dolmen, in simple terms, is a form of megalithic monument in which a large capstone, often a natural boulder, is raised on a small number of upright supports. They are found elsewhere on the Dingle Peninsula and in other parts of Ireland, and they sometimes appear near isolated standing stones or pairs of standing stones. What makes the Arda Mór situation unusual is the association with a stone alignment rather than with single or paired uprights. According to research published by Ó Nualláin in 1978, no such pairing of boulder-dolmen and alignment had previously been recorded. The site was documented as part of J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region of the Dingle Peninsula, which drew on local knowledge as well as field observation. That survey is what captured the detail about the demolition, a piece of information that would otherwise have gone entirely unrecorded.
The alignment and outlier stone survive on their hillside with a clear westward view reaching as far as the Blasket Islands on a good day. The boulder-dolmen itself, of course, is gone, which gives the site a particular quality: what is missing is arguably as significant as what remains.