Standing stone, Shannera, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Shannera, Co. Kerry

At the edge of a vegetable garden in Shannera, on Kerry's Iveragh Peninsula, a prehistoric standing stone has been quietly absorbed into a boundary wall.

It is a small domestic detail with a long prehistory: the stone was raised, most likely during the Bronze Age, as a solitary upright marker in the landscape, and it has since become a kind of accidental garden feature, its ancient purpose subordinated to the practical business of keeping a plot enclosed.

The stone itself is substantial. Rectangular in elevation, it stands 2.1 metres high and measures roughly one metre by at least 1.2 metres at its base, giving it considerable mass for a single upright. It leans noticeably to the north, oriented east to west, which may reflect settling over centuries or the particular way it was set when it was incorporated into the wall. Behind it, Knockbrack rises steeply to the south, the hillside framing the stone in a way that may or may not be coincidental. Standing stones across Ireland were sometimes positioned in deliberate relationship to prominent landscape features, ridgelines and summits used as markers or sight-lines, though whether that applies here is not recorded. The survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996 documents the stone as part of a wider picture of prehistoric activity across this part of south Kerry, a region unusually dense with megalithic and early medieval remains.

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