Stone row, Derrineden, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Stone Monuments

Stone row, Derrineden, Co. Kerry

On the Ordnance Survey maps, this site is labelled simply 'Gallaun', the Irish term for a standing stone, which gives little away about what is actually here: a three-stone alignment on the south-eastern slopes of Coomduff, set in boggy pasture and looking out over the valley of the Cummeragh river.

Stone rows, as prehistoric monuments, are exactly what the name suggests, a sequence of standing stones arranged in a line, and they appear across the uplands of south-west Ireland in considerable numbers. What makes individual examples interesting is the variation in their condition, their orientation, and the quiet specificity of their dimensions.

This particular row is orientated NE-SW. The easternmost of the three stones is no longer upright; it lies prostrate, measuring roughly 2.45 metres in length, just over a metre wide, and about a quarter of a metre thick. The two uprights are set 0.62 metres apart. The taller of the pair stands at the north-eastern end, reaching 2.35 metres high, and its base is notable for the packing stones still visible around it, the prehistoric equivalent of dry-setting a post, wedging smaller stones around the base to hold the larger one vertical. The south-western upright is considerably shorter at 0.9 metres and leans slightly towards the south-east, the kind of slow drift that happens over millennia in soft, wet ground. The survey data for this site was drawn together by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan for their 1996 archaeological survey of the Iveragh peninsula, published by Cork University Press.

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