Gallauns, Annagh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Stone Monuments
Three red sandstone boulders lying beside a field boundary in County Kerry might not look like much at first glance, but their colour alone marks them out as something displaced.
The surrounding landscape is limestone country, and these stones, rectangular in section and tapering slightly towards the top, do not belong to it geologically. They were shifted from their original position during agricultural clearance, removed from a field where the Ordnance Survey's second edition had already recorded them, somewhat mournfully, as a site rather than a living monument. What survives is most likely the remnant of a three-stone alignment, a prehistoric arrangement in which upright stones were set out in a row, often across a hillside or open ground. The largest of the three measures 2.63 metres long and 0.90 metres wide; the middle stone is noticeably smaller; and the third has split into two fragments, giving a total reconstructed length of around 0.82 metres. The graduated decrease in size from one end to the other is one reason the alignment interpretation holds: such graded sequences are a recognised feature of this monument type in the Irish archaeological record.
The area around Annagh carries a wider cluster of ancient remains. In 1841, the scholar and topographer John O'Donovan recorded a stone fort, known as Tonakilla Fort, east of the church at Annagh. At its south-east side he noted eight stones, six lying flat and two standing upright, positioned, as he put it, as if forming the head and foot of a grave, set ten feet apart. That observation was later quoted by the antiquarian William Copeland Borlase in 1875. A caher, to explain the term, is a stone-walled ringfort, typically circular in plan and built without mortar, and they are found in considerable numbers across Kerry and the wider Munster region. Whether the prostrate stones O'Donovan described were ever part of the same alignment now lying beside the field boundary is not recorded, but the density of early monuments in this small area suggests a landscape that was, at some point, deliberately and carefully organised.