Holed stone, Mám An Óraigh, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Stone Monuments

Holed stone, Mám An Óraigh, Co. Kerry

Among the cluster of Early Christian remains at Kilcolman, known in Irish as Cill na gColmán, one small object sits quietly apart from the more immediately legible features of the site.

A flat stone, roughly square and barely the width of an outstretched hand, lies loose in the north-eastern part of the enclosure. What distinguishes it is a single circular perforation, neatly bored through its centre, measuring just four centimetres across. Holed stones of this kind appear at a number of Early Christian and prehistoric sites across Ireland, and their purposes remain genuinely uncertain; proposed explanations range from oath-taking and ritual hand-clasping to more practical uses such as tethering or fastening. This one offers no obvious answer.

The site as a whole occupies the southern slopes of an east-west spur of Lateevemore, on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, with Ventry Harbour visible below. It forms part of the extraordinarily dense archaeological landscape of the Corca Dhuibhne region, documented in J. Cuppage's 1986 survey of the peninsula. The church site at Kilcolman, dedicated perhaps to Colmán, belongs to a period when small monastic and ecclesiastical foundations were scattered across the Irish countryside, often in elevated positions that combined a degree of seclusion with long views over water and farmland. The holed stone, catalogued separately from the church remains proper, has no fixed position within any structure; it simply lies there, displaced from whatever context originally gave it meaning.

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