Standing stone, Derreennagreer, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Stone Monuments
On the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, there is a site recorded on the second edition of the Ordnance Survey map under the Irish word "gallaun", a term for a standing stone, usually a single upright megalith whose precise original purpose remains debated but which is commonly associated with prehistoric ritual or boundary marking.
The unusual thing about this particular gallaun in the townland of Derreennagreer is that it is no longer there. The spot it occupied, in boggy pasture roughly 350 metres south of a nearby recorded monument, is simply empty ground.
The stone's absence is not the result of ancient collapse or gradual subsidence into the bog. According to the landowner, it was removed within living memory, meaning sometime in the twentieth century, quietly taken out of the landscape by human hands rather than lost to time in any romantic sense. Its presence on the OS map fixes it as a known point in the archaeological record of South Kerry, catalogued as part of the broader survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996. That survey documented hundreds of monuments across one of the most archaeologically layered regions in Ireland, and this site, now monument-less, remains part of that inventory.
What stands here now is essentially an absence, which in its own way is informative. The boggy pasture that once held the stone is the kind of ground that preserved countless prehistoric features across Kerry for millennia, and the fact that a gallaun survived long enough to be mapped and then was lost so recently gives the site a particular, slightly melancholy quality. It is a record of something that existed, and a reminder of how quickly the physical evidence of prehistory can disappear.