Standing stone, Bray, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Bray, Co. Kerry

At the foot of Bray Head on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, there is a conspicuous absence where a stone once stood.

A gallaun, the Irish term for a solitary standing stone, rose here to more than six feet in height, looking out over Emlagh bog and the Atlantic. It was removed sometime in the 1930s, it was never recorded on the Ordnance Survey maps, and almost everything known about it comes from local memory rather than any formal documentation.

What that local memory preserved is intriguing. When the stone was taken down, an iron spearhead was reportedly found during its removal, suggesting the site had been marked or used in ways that went beyond the merely symbolic. More tantalising still, some accounts hold that the stone carried an ogham inscription. Ogham is an early medieval script found across Ireland and parts of Britain, typically carved as a series of notches and lines along the edge of a stone, and often used to record personal names in the early Christian period. If the reports are accurate, this particular gallaun may have functioned as a memorial or territorial marker of some significance, positioned deliberately at the base of the steep northern slopes of Bray Head, with open bog and the sea spread out before it. The absence of any OS record means the stone existed largely outside official cartographic history, known mainly to those who lived alongside it until the decade it disappeared.

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Pete F
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