Standing stone, Cathair Scoilbín, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Cathair Scoilbín, Co. Kerry

On the Ordnance Survey maps, a symbol marks a standing stone at Cathair Scoilbín, on level ground at the foot of the northern slopes of Reenconnell in County Kerry.

The Irish word for such a stone is gallaun, a term used across the Dingle Peninsula for the solitary upright stones that punctuate its fields and hillsides, most of them prehistoric in origin and poorly understood. This particular gallaun, however, is no longer there. The map records a presence that the ground itself no longer confirms.

The stone's existence was documented in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, a meticulous catalogue of the Dingle Peninsula's monuments compiled under the Irish name Oidhreacht Chorca Dhuibhne. By the time that record was revisited in more recent research, the stone had apparently vanished, leaving only its cartographic ghost. What happened to it is unrecorded. Gallauns across Ireland have been removed over the centuries for any number of reasons, absorbed into field walls, broken up, or simply toppled and buried, their original purpose long since obscured. Whether this one met such a fate, or whether the OS surveyors of an earlier era recorded something already lost or misidentified, is not known.

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