Standing stone, Dún Na Manach, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Dún Na Manach, Co. Kerry

On the Dingle Peninsula, a prehistoric standing stone has ended up sharing a farmyard with a concrete tank.

The tank partly obscures two of its sides, and the stone itself is an irregular, roughly trapezoidal shape rather than the neat upright pillar that tends to feature in popular imagination. It measures around 1.3 metres along its north-northeast to south-southwest axis, at least 0.8 metres wide, and 1.35 metres in height: modest by the standards of some Irish examples, but still unmistakably deliberate in the way it sits in the landscape.

Standing stones are among the most common and least understood prehistoric monuments in Ireland. Erected anywhere from the Neolithic through the Bronze Age, they served purposes that remain genuinely uncertain, whether as boundary markers, ritual focal points, or astronomical indicators. This particular stone at Dún Na Manach was recorded as part of the Corca Dhuibhne Archaeological Survey of the Dingle Peninsula, published in 1986 under the authorship of J. Cuppage. The place name Dún Na Manach refers broadly to the area around what was historically a monastic enclosure, the word "manach" meaning monk in Irish, suggesting layers of occupation and meaning in the surrounding landscape that predate and postdate the stone itself.

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