Standing stone, Toon, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Toon, Co. Kerry

On a quiet stretch of the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, a single upright stone breaks the landscape roughly forty-five metres west of a wider archaeological complex.

It is a modest thing on paper, standing just over a metre and a quarter tall, narrow and rectangular in profile, its long axis oriented northeast to southwest. But its qualification as a standing stone comes with a caveat: the designation is provisional, a "possible" rather than a confirmed example of the type.

Standing stones are among the most enigmatic survivals of prehistoric Ireland. Erected singly or in groups, sometimes marking boundaries or burial sites, sometimes for purposes that remain genuinely unknown, they appear across the country in varying states of survival and certainty. This one, recorded as part of the archaeological survey of south Kerry compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996, sits within a landscape that clearly held meaning for earlier inhabitants, given the presence of the nearby complex it is associated with. The stone measures eighty-five centimetres across at its base and only ten centimetres in depth, giving it a distinctly slab-like character rather than the more rounded or irregular form seen in many comparable examples.

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