Standing stone - pair, Maumnahaltora, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone – pair, Maumnahaltora, Co. Kerry

Two sandstone slabs lean against each other on a hillside at Maumnahaltora in County Kerry, propped together like a pair of exhausted walkers.

Between them sits a small pile of loose stones, placed deliberately in the gap. It is an arrangement that resists easy classification, neither a conventional standing stone pair in the upright, parallel sense, nor anything that fits neatly into the standard prehistoric catalogue.

The two stones are long and low rather than tall and imposing. Stone A, on the downslope side, runs to about 1.5 metres in length but stands only 0.7 metres high; Stone B, slightly upslope, is 1.2 metres long and 0.65 metres high. Both are oriented roughly east to west along their long axis. What gives the site its particular character is the cluster of small loose stones wedged between the two slabs, a detail that suggests deliberate human arrangement, though whether ancient or more recent is not recorded. The pair sits around 35 metres to the north-east of a wedge tomb, a type of megalithic burial monument common in the west of Ireland, typically dating to the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age, in which a tapering stone-roofed chamber was used for collective burial. A further 11 metres to the north-east stands a single upright stone, making this a loose grouping of at least three separate elements spread across the slope, each distinct but clearly part of the same landscape of prehistoric activity.

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