Stone circle - multiple-stone, Readrinagh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Stone Monuments
In the scrub-covered cutaway bog of Readrinagh in County Kerry, a stone circle of twenty-nine stones once stood, with a single stone at its centre.
It even had a name: 'Cloca Breaca', which translates roughly as 'speckled cloak' or 'speckled stones' in Irish. Today, there are no visible remains. The place persists only in records, a circle that is easier to document than to find.
The earliest cartographic trace appears on the 1846 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which marks a circular stony area roughly fifteen metres across on the sloping bogland. A more detailed account came a century later, when the circle was recorded during the 1940s as part of the Schools Manuscript collection, a countrywide project in which schoolchildren gathered local folklore and place knowledge. That record describes a ring of twenty-nine stones with a central stone, the individual uprights measuring approximately 0.77 metres high, 0.8 metres wide, and 0.5 metres thick, and the overall diameter given as thirty-five feet, or just over ten and a half metres. The slight discrepancy between that measurement and the fifteen-metre figure on the earlier OS map may reflect different methods of measurement, or simply the natural difficulty of reading a degraded or partially buried monument. Cutaway bog, where the upper layers of peat have been removed, tends to be an unstable and shifting environment, and whatever physical trace remained in 1846 had evidently disappeared entirely by the time a formal survey was attempted in later decades.