Standing stone, Foilatrisnig, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Foilatrisnig, Co. Kerry

On a ridge between two Irish-language valleys on the Dingle Peninsula, a sandstone slab has been standing upright for several thousand years, watching the land around it go from cultivation back to rough wet pasture.

It sits just east of the crest of the high ground separating Gleann na nGealt and Gleann Meáin, oriented roughly SSW to NNE, and at 2.2 metres tall it is a substantial presence on an open hillside with no obvious shelter or enclosure around it.

Standing stones, as a class of monument, are among the most quietly enigmatic survivals of prehistoric Ireland. Their precise purposes are rarely certain; some mark boundaries or routeways, others appear connected to burial sites or astronomical alignments, and many resist easy interpretation entirely. This particular example is a tapered slab, wider at the base at 0.9 metres and narrowing to 0.38 metres at the top, with an average thickness of around 0.23 metres, giving it a lean, blade-like profile rather than a squat block. The Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, published by J. Cuppage in 1986 under the Irish-language title reflecting the Corca Dhuibhne heritage of the area, recorded it as sitting on land that had once been farmed but had long since been left to revert. That detail carries its own quiet weight: the stone has outlasted whatever agricultural life surrounded it, and now stands in wet pasture rather than the worked ground that once gave it context.

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