Standing stone, Kilgobnet, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Kilgobnet, Co. Kerry

Some ancient stones vanish not through erosion or the slow work of centuries, but simply because someone decided to move them.

At Kilgobnet in County Kerry, a possible standing stone that had survived millennia in the landscape was removed sometime in the late 1970s, leaving no mark on the Ordnance Survey maps and very little trace in the record beyond a grid reference and a brief note of its absence.

Standing stones are among the most common yet least understood monuments in the Irish countryside, single upright slabs of stone erected during the Bronze Age or earlier, whose original purposes remain a matter of genuine debate among archaeologists. They may have served as boundary markers, ritual focal points, or astronomical indicators. This particular example stood approximately 150 metres east of another recorded monument in the area and was never captured in the standard cartographic surveys. Its removal in the late 1970s, likely during agricultural improvement works of the kind that altered so much of the Irish landscape in that decade, means it now exists only as a cautionary footnote in A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan's archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press in 1996.

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