Standing stone - pair, An Garrán, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Stone Monuments
One of these two stones is still standing; the other is not, and the question of why it fell, and when, has no easy answer.
At An Garrán on the Dingle Peninsula, a slender prehistoric monolith rises three metres from reclaimed pastureland at the northern foot of Knockavrogeen hill, roughly four hundred metres west of the Milltown river. It is an unusually fine specimen, tapering from a base width of 1.8 metres to a sharp point at the top, yet only a few centimetres thick at its edges, giving it something of the appearance of a great stone blade oriented roughly north-north-east to south-south-west. Lying 1.6 metres to its north is a prostrate slab, around 2.48 metres long, that almost certainly once stood upright beside it. A pair of standing stones, in other words, reduced over time to one standing and one fallen.
Standing stones of this kind are a familiar, if still poorly understood, feature of the Kerry landscape. They were erected during prehistory, most likely in the Bronze Age, and their precise purposes remain a matter of debate, whether they marked territory, commemorated the dead, or served some astronomical or ritual function that left no written record. What makes this site quietly interesting is both the precision of the surviving stone's form and the fact that it appears to have had a companion. J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, which covers much of the Dingle Peninsula, recorded the site in detail and noted the likelihood that the prostrate slab was once upright. There is also a comparable monument approximately five hundred metres to the south, suggesting that this particular stretch of ground held some significance for the people who placed these stones here.