Standing stone, Carrigeendaniel, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Carrigeendaniel, Co. Kerry

A prehistoric standing stone surrounded by suburban housing is an unusual sight at the best of times, but this one in Carrigeendaniel, on the western edge of Tralee, carries an additional quiet sadness.

The stone appears to have been broken at some point in recent times, and the ground around it has been levelled and landscaped, smoothing away whatever immediate context it once had. What remains stands just over a metre tall, 0.70 metres wide and 0.25 metres thick, a relatively modest slab that now finds itself enclosed on its eastern and southern sides by residential houses.

On the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the stone is marked as "Gallaun", the anglicised form of the Irish word for a standing stone, which suggests it was a known local landmark long before the housing estate arrived around it. Standing stones of this type are among the most common prehistoric monuments in Ireland, raised during the Bronze Age for purposes that remain genuinely uncertain, whether as boundary markers, ritual focal points, or memorials. Michael Connolly, in his 2008 doctoral thesis on the prehistoric settlement of the Lee Valley near Tralee, recorded this stone as part of a broader prehistoric landscape that the spread of modern development has largely obscured or fragmented.

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