Standing stone, Feaghmaan, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Feaghmaan, Co. Kerry

On Valentia Island, on the lower south-eastern slopes of Feaghmaan mountain, a prehistoric standing stone has been quietly absorbed into the boundary hedge of a vegetable garden.

It has not been moved to a museum or fenced off behind interpretive panels. It simply grows vegetables on one side and prehistory on the other, a boulder of roughly rectangular form leaning slightly to the north-west as if it has been doing so for a very long time, which it almost certainly has.

The stone stands 1.85 metres high and measures approximately 0.9 metres by 0.5 metres at its base, oriented ENE to WSW. Both faces are uneven. On the north-west face there is a possible cupmark, a small, shallow circular depression about five centimetres across and three centimetres deep, of the kind made deliberately in stone during the Bronze Age and found at prehistoric sites across Ireland and Britain. Immediately beside it runs a natural sinuous groove in the rock, which raises the question of whether the two features were ever confused for each other, or whether the groove may even have influenced the choice of this particular stone. Cupmarks are among the least understood of prehistoric markings; their purpose is debated, though they appear repeatedly in ritual or boundary contexts. Whether this one was made by human hands or merely resembles one is noted as uncertain. That uncertainty is itself telling; it is the kind of ambiguity that attaches to objects old enough to have outlasted any explanation of themselves.

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Pete F
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