Standing stone, Gortnaboul, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Gortnaboul, Co. Kerry

A small notch cut into the side of a standing stone might seem like a minor detail, but on a prehistoric monument it tends to raise more questions than it answers.

This stone, rising just over a metre from the rough pasture of Gortnaboul in south-west Kerry, carries exactly such a feature: a deliberate notch midway along its south-south-east face. Whether it served a practical, ritual, or astronomical purpose is not recorded, and that silence is part of what makes the stone worth pausing over.

The stone itself is modest in scale, roughly rectangular in both plan and cross-section, measuring 0.8 metres wide and 0.3 metres deep, with a height of 1.25 metres. It stands on an east-facing slope on the western bank of the Cummeenboy stream and is orientated along a north-north-west to south-south-east axis. Standing stones of this kind are a familiar, if poorly understood, feature of the Irish landscape. Most are thought to date from the Bronze Age, though precise dating is rarely possible without excavation. They appear singly or in groupings, sometimes in alignment with other monuments or landscape features, and sometimes, as here, in relative isolation in rough ground that has never been substantially disturbed by later agriculture. The notch, positioned at the midpoint of one of the longer faces, adds a specific intentionality to what might otherwise read as a plain upright slab.

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Pete F
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