Standing stone, Liss, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Liss, Co. Kerry

On the south bank of the Ferta river in County Kerry, a stone stands in the bog that the Ordnance Survey never saw fit to record.

It is barely a metre tall, an orthostat, meaning a single upright standing stone, set into blanket bog and leaning slightly towards the north-west as the soft ground beneath it has shifted over the centuries. Its modest dimensions, just 1.04 metres above present ground level and 75 centimetres across at the base, make it easy to dismiss as unremarkable. But the fact that it exists at all, uncharted and quietly persistent in the wet ground beside a Kerry river, gives it a particular kind of presence.

Standing stones of this kind are scattered across the Irish landscape in their thousands, and their purposes remain genuinely contested. Some mark boundaries, some are associated with burial, some may have had astronomical or ceremonial functions, and many remain simply unexplained. What is clear is that this particular stone, aligned on a north-east to south-west axis, was placed deliberately by someone, at some point in prehistory, in this specific stretch of bogland on the Iveragh Peninsula. Its absence from Ordnance Survey mapping suggests it went unnoticed during the great nineteenth-century surveys that documented so much of the Irish countryside, which is itself a small historical curiosity. The blanket bog that surrounds it, a landscape shaped by centuries of wet Atlantic climate and human land use, has in some ways preserved it, holding it in place even as it slowly tilts.

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Pete F
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