Standing stone, An Choill Mhór, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, An Choill Mhór, Co. Kerry

On the south-eastern slopes of the Owenmore valley in County Kerry, there is a site that manages to be archaeologically significant and archaeologically absent at the same time.

Two standing stones were once recorded here, along with what the old maps called 'Cloghauns', a name referring to small dry-stone beehive huts of the kind scattered across the Dingle Peninsula. None of it can now be found. The ground is rough, wet pastureland, and whatever once stood here has either collapsed into it or was never quite where anyone thought it was.

The confusion stretches back to the Ordnance Survey maps themselves. The first edition showed a pair of standing stones and a small rectangular building at a spot labelled 'Cloghauns'. By the time the second edition was produced, a circular structure carrying the same name had appeared on the map, placed some twenty to thirty metres south-east of the original position. Whether this reflects an actual difference on the ground, a surveyor's error, or some combination of the two is no longer possible to determine. J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, the Dingle Peninsula, documented the site as no. 1571, but even that record acknowledges the muddled picture. The classification in the title, 'standing stone', is itself a provisional label applied to something that has left no physical evidence behind.

What makes An Choill Mhór quietly instructive is precisely this: it is a place where the map and the land have drifted apart, and where the archaeological record amounts to a catalogue of contradictions. The wet pasture holds no obvious surface features, and any visit would be as much an exercise in reading absence as in reading landscape.

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Pete F
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