Standing stone, Clochán Na Nuagh, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Clochán Na Nuagh, Co. Kerry

A single standing stone rising from the flat bogland northwest of Ballinskelligs Bay, this gallaun, as such stones are known in the Irish tradition, does not appear on Ordnance Survey maps at all.

It simply stands there, 1.65 metres tall, tapering from a base of 1.25 metres down to a narrow point, oriented northwest to southeast, unacknowledged by cartography and largely unremembered by the surrounding community.

What makes the situation stranger is that this stone was apparently not always so solitary, at least on paper. A surveyor named Skinner once recorded five further gallauns within the same townland of Clochán Na Nuagh, a place on the Iveragh Peninsula in south Kerry. None of those five appear on any OS map, and none are remembered locally today. Whether they were removed, buried by encroaching bog, or simply misrecorded is not known. The one stone that does survive is, in a sense, the last visible member of a group that has otherwise dissolved entirely from both the landscape and local memory. The Iveragh Peninsula is one of the more archaeologically dense parts of Ireland, and standing stones of this kind were erected during prehistory for purposes that remain genuinely uncertain, possibly as boundary markers, possibly as memorials, possibly as components of ritual landscapes that no longer read as coherent to modern eyes.

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Pete F
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