Standing stone - pair, Kimego, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone – pair, Kimego, Co. Kerry

On a sloping field above the Ferta river estuary in south Kerry, two prehistoric standing stones have been quietly falling apart for a very long time.

One lies flat on the ground; the other survives only as a broken stump, its upper portion having toppled and come to rest a metre or so away. Neither appears on Ordnance Survey maps, and the site is classed as poorly preserved. Yet even in this fractured state, the stones reward a closer look, because the arithmetic of their dimensions tells a more dramatic story than their current condition suggests.

The stump that still stands reaches 1.45 metres, but its fallen upper section measures another 3.55 metres. Reunite them and you would have a single monolith roughly 5 metres tall, an unusually substantial prehistoric monument by any measure. The second stone, now fully prostrate, is 4.7 metres long and nearly 1.6 metres across at its widest point. These are not modest markers. The pair were aligned on a northeast-southwest axis, and they sit immediately adjacent to a ceallúnach, a term for an early medieval burial ground associated with unbaptised children or those excluded from consecrated ground, which lies to the northwest of the stones. The proximity of prehistoric and early Christian funerary traditions in a single field corner is the kind of quiet layering that this part of the Iveragh Peninsula, in County Kerry, tends to produce without announcement. The site was documented by Seán Ó Nualláin in 1988 and later included in the archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, published by Cork University Press in 1996.

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