Standing stone - pair, Canburrin, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone – pair, Canburrin, Co. Kerry

On the south-eastern slope of Bentee mountain in County Kerry, two standing stones occupy a quiet spot near a modern field boundary, and one of them has been lying down for long enough that the earth has begun to swallow it.

That horizontal stone, partly concealed in the ground, measures around 3.4 metres in length, making it considerably larger than the upright companion beside it. The standing stone, a slender block leaning noticeably towards the south-east, reaches 1.95 metres in height and is oriented along a north-east to south-west axis. The pair together form what archaeologists class as a gallaun grouping, "gallaun" being an Anglicisation of the Irish "gallán", meaning a standing stone or pillar, typically of prehistoric origin.

What makes this site quietly puzzling is a cartographic gap: only one stone appears on the Ordnance Survey maps, leaving the prostrate stone effectively unrecorded in the official landscape. Whether it had already fallen and partly sunk by the time the area was first surveyed, or whether it was simply missed, is not clear. The pairing was documented by Seán Ó Nualláin in 1988, as part of a broader study of standing stones across Ireland, and later incorporated into the archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan. The Iveragh Peninsula, of which this slope forms a small part, is one of the more archaeologically dense areas of south-west Kerry, with prehistoric monuments distributed across its mountains and coastal margins. Paired standing stones of this kind are found elsewhere in Munster and are thought to date broadly to the Bronze Age, though their precise function remains a matter of ongoing discussion among archaeologists.

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