Standing stone, Leataoibh Mór, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Stone Monuments
On the north-western slopes of Lateevemore, overlooking Smerwick Harbour and the lowlands between, there is a field called Gort na Sprice where a standing stone once stood.
It no longer exists. What makes this place quietly notable is precisely that absence, and the paper trail that preserves what was there before it vanished.
The stone was recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map as a 'Gallaun', the Irish term for a single upright standing stone, typically prehistoric in origin and often associated with boundary marking, burial, or ritual use whose exact purpose remains debated by archaeologists. The accompanying Ordnance Survey Name Book described it as roughly three feet, or about 0.9 metres, high and around two feet, or 0.6 metres, broad. Those are modest dimensions, the kind of stone that might easily be toppled, incorporated into a field wall, or simply lost beneath successive generations of agricultural rearrangement. By the time J. Cuppage conducted the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, published in 1986, no trace of it could be found. The field name, Gort na Sprice, survived in local memory even after the stone itself had gone.