Standing stone, Cathair Deargáin Thuaidh, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Cathair Deargáin Thuaidh, Co. Kerry

On the lower slopes of Reenconnell in Co. Kerry, there is a thin slab of stone that refuses to be easily categorised.

Standing 1.53 metres high but only 11 to 17 centimetres thick, it is more blade than pillar, its long axis tilted just 10 degrees east of north. What complicates any straightforward reading of it are two small notches cut into either face roughly 30 centimetres below the top, each one 7 to 9 centimetres long and about 5 centimetres deep. Together they create the unmistakable suggestion of a rudimentary cross. It is that ambiguity, whether this is a prehistoric standing stone adapted for Christian use, or a Christian marker that simply resembles one, that makes the stone genuinely difficult to place.

Standing stones, as a category, are among the least understood monuments in the Irish landscape. Erected from the Neolithic through to the early medieval period, they served purposes ranging from burial markers to boundary indicators to sites of ritual significance, and distinguishing between these functions after the fact is rarely straightforward. The notches at Reenconnell add a further layer of uncertainty. J. Cuppage, writing in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey published by Oidhreacht Chorca Dhuibhne, noted the cross-like effect with explicit caution, flagging that the stone was included in the standing stone category only with reservation. That hesitation is itself informative. The stone sits roughly 30 metres west of a substantial ringfort, one of the enclosed farmsteads typical of early medieval Ireland, and about 150 metres west of the old Saint's Road, a routeway associated with pilgrimage on the Dingle Peninsula. Whatever the stone is, it stands at a junction of the ancient and the sacred.

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