Standing stone, Castlekelly, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Stone Monuments
Somewhere within the grounds of Glenasmole Lodge in south County Dublin, a large granite boulder once carried a marble slab bearing one of the more deadpan inscriptions in Irish antiquarian history.
According to the slab, a giant named Finna Koon transported the stone on his shoulder from the mountain opposite on the 1st of April, 1444. He stood nine feet and seven inches tall and weighed forty-four stone. The date, of course, is April Fool's Day, and the inscription reads less like a genuine folk belief and more like an elaborate eighteenth or nineteenth-century joke, set in stone with enough ceremony to confuse future generations entirely.
The record of the stone, cited by Healy in 1961, places it inside the boundary wall of Glenasmole Lodge, a property in the glacially carved valley of Glenasmole, the Glen of the Thrushes, which cuts into the Dublin Mountains south-west of Tallaght. Standing stones, as a class of monument, are prehistoric upright stones whose precise original purposes remain contested; they have been associated with burial sites, territorial markers, and astronomical alignments, though many were later absorbed into local legend and folklore. This particular example seems to have been repurposed entirely for comic effect at some point in its history, with the marble slab addition transforming a plain granite boulder into a novelty. The compiled record, prepared by Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy, notes that the precise location of the stone is now unknown, which gives the whole episode a fittingly elusive quality.
For anyone drawn to Glenasmole, the valley itself is accessible from the Bohernabreena reservoir road, and the area rewards a visit for its relative quietness given its proximity to Dublin city. The lodge and its grounds are private, so there is no straightforward way to view the stone directly, and given that its exact position has been lost to the record, it may no longer be findable at all. What remains is the inscription itself, preserved in Healy's 1961 account, and the faint possibility that somewhere behind a boundary wall, a granite boulder is still sitting where a nine-foot giant supposedly left it on an April morning six centuries ago.