Gallaun, Lyranes, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Stone Monuments

Gallaun, Lyranes, Co. Kerry

On the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map, a site near the Caragh river in County Kerry is marked with the word "Gallaun", a term used in Irish placename tradition to denote a standing stone, typically a single upright megalith of prehistoric origin.

It sits, cartographically at least, on low-lying level pastureland to the east of the river. In reality, nothing is there. No stone, no socket hole, no local memory of one ever having stood.

The absence itself is what makes the place quietly arresting. The OS surveyors who produced that first edition were working across Ireland in the early nineteenth century, recording what they found and, crucially, what local people told them was there. A gallaun that made it onto the map presumably existed, or was at least remembered, at the point of survey. At some stage between that recording and the present day, the monument vanished entirely, leaving not even a fragment embedded in a field boundary or a story attached to it in the surrounding area. Archaeological fieldwork carried out for the Iveragh Peninsula survey, published by Cork University Press in 1996, confirmed what the landscape already suggested: no visible trace survives, and the site is not recalled locally.

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Pete F
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