Standing stone, Termons, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Termons, Co. Kerry

On the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, a squat boulder sits on a low rounded hill surrounded by marshy bogland, and the Ordnance Survey maps do not acknowledge it exists.

This is the kind of stone that rewards the attentive traveller rather than the one following a signpost. It is not a tall, dramatic monolith of the sort that draws photographers; at just over a metre high but nearly a metre and a half wide at its base, it is broad and irregular, oriented roughly north to south, more like something the landscape is resting a hand on than raising a fist with.

Standing stones are among the most quietly mysterious features of the Irish countryside. Erected most commonly during the Bronze Age, though sometimes earlier or later, they can mark boundaries, burial sites, astronomical alignments, or routes across difficult terrain, and in many cases no one can say with confidence which. This particular stone, in the townland of Termons, a name that itself carries historical weight, deriving from the Irish word for church lands or sanctuary territory, sits in a setting that hints at a longer human story. Scattered around it to the north, east, and south are stretches of old field walls, running in fragments between five and fifteen metres long. These are the kind of walls that predate any living memory, their original enclosures long since dissolved back into the bog.

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Pete F
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