Standing stone, Lacka, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Stone Monuments
In a field at Lacka in north County Kerry, a single stone stands in the ground, upright and alone.
It is not especially tall, reaching somewhere between 0.82 and 0.96 metres depending on where you measure, and it is nearly as wide as it is high, at just under a metre across and about half a metre thick. Its proportions are almost squat, more block than blade, which makes it an unusual specimen among standing stones, a broad category of prehistoric upright stones that were erected across Ireland from the Neolithic period onwards, sometimes as markers, sometimes in association with burials or ritual landscapes, and often for reasons that remain genuinely unclear.
What little is recorded about this stone offers no ceremony. It appears on a 1939 Ordnance Survey map, labelled plainly as a standing stone, which at minimum confirms it was recognised as a distinct and deliberate feature of the landscape by that point. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995 through Brandon in association with FÁS, catalogued it as entry number 14, providing the basic measurements that remain the core of what is formally known about it. North Kerry is not short of prehistoric monuments, and this stone sits quietly among them, its age unrecorded and its original purpose unspecified.