Standing stone, Na Leadhba Liatha, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Na Leadhba Liatha, Co. Kerry

At Na Leadhba Liatha in County Kerry, a standing stone rises 2.5 metres from a ploughed field, oriented precisely north to south.

The stone has an unusual profile: it widens slightly as it ascends before tapering back inward toward the top, giving it a subtly shouldered appearance rather than the simple tapered form common to many such monuments. On the second edition of the Ordnance Survey maps it is marked with the Irish term "gallaun", a word used to designate a single upright standing stone, and it sits just 4 metres north of a boulder-burial, a prehistoric monument type in which a large capstone rests directly on the ground or on small supporting stones rather than on tall uprights.

What makes this site quietly complicated is how much has been lost within living memory. When the antiquarian Lynch visited in 1902, he recorded not just the tall gallaun but an alignment of smaller stones close to the boulder-burial, three of them protruding roughly 30 centimetres above ground, with a boulder of white quartz at the centre. Quartz carried obvious symbolic weight in prehistoric Ireland and its deliberate placement at the centre of such an arrangement was unlikely to be accidental. Today the field is under the plough, and of that entire alignment only a single prostrate stone survives, 1.35 metres long and lying 1 metre northwest of the boulder-burial. Local knowledge holds that it too once stood upright. The contrast between the surviving gallaun, still tall and intact after thousands of years, and the near-total erasure of its companion stones within the last century or so, gives the place an almost documentary quality about how quickly an ancient landscape can be simplified into something unreadable.

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