Standing stone, Dooneen, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Dooneen, Co. Kerry

There is a field in Dooneen, County Kerry, where a slight hollow in the ground is the only indication that something once stood there.

The depression is easy to miss, the kind of subtle irregularity in pasture that most people walk past without a second thought. It marks the former location of a standing stone, a single upright prehistoric monument, that no longer exists in that spot at all.

In the 1940s, the stone was recorded as a fine gallan, the Irish term for a standing stone, on the lands of a Mr. Cronin. It measured roughly six feet tall and two and a half feet wide, cut from brown sandstone, substantial enough to have persisted in the landscape for potentially thousands of years since it was first erected. At some point after that mid-twentieth-century record was made, the landowner removed it during drainage works. The act was practical rather than malicious, the kind of decision made when ancient stonework sits inconveniently in the path of agricultural improvement, but the result is the same: a monument that endured from prehistory into the modern era is now gone, and what remains is a faint concavity in the soil where it once stood.

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Pete F
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