Standing stone, Kilfallinga, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Stone Monuments
In the townland of Kilfallinga in County Kerry, a standing stone occupies a piece of ground it has held for a very long time.
Standing stones, erected singly or in loose groupings across Ireland during the Bronze Age and occasionally earlier, are among the most quietly inscrutable monuments in the landscape. They were planted upright into the earth, sometimes marking boundaries, sometimes associated with burial, sometimes for reasons that remain genuinely unclear, and they have a way of outlasting almost everything built around them.
Kilfallinga is a small townland in Kerry, a county that holds a remarkable concentration of prehistoric field monuments, partly because its remoter peninsulas were never intensively developed in ways that would have removed or buried earlier remains. The stone there is recorded as a monument in its own right, though the details of its dimensions, its orientation, and any associated finds or features have not yet been made publicly available. What can be said is that standing stones of this kind typically range from modest slabs barely taller than a person to imposing pillars several metres high, and that their survival into the present usually owes something to local reluctance to disturb them, a reluctance rooted in folklore as much as any formal protection.
