Standing stone, An Tulaigh, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, An Tulaigh, Co. Kerry

On a ridge between Foilclogh mountain and the Inny river on the Iveragh Peninsula, a standing stone waits to be found.

The problem is that nobody has managed to find it. Marked on Ordnance Survey maps under the Irish designation "Gallaun", a term used for a solitary upright stone of prehistoric origin, the monument sits in an area now swallowed by commercial forestry, and attempts to locate it on the ground have come to nothing. There is something quietly unsettling about that: a feature old enough to be recorded, named, and mapped, yet effectively lost behind a wall of conifers.

Gallauns are among the more enigmatic prehistoric survivals in the Irish landscape. Their original purpose remains debated, with theories ranging from boundary markers to ritual or astronomical functions, though most date to the Bronze Age. The Iveragh Peninsula has a notable concentration of such stones, and the one at An Tulaigh was recorded as part of a broader archaeological survey of south Kerry carried out by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, published by Cork University Press in 1996. The ridge location, positioned between a named mountain and a river, suggests it may once have served as a waymarker or territorial indicator in a landscape that would have looked very different before the twentieth-century afforestation programmes that have reshaped much of upland Kerry.

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