Stone row, Scrahanagullaun, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Stone row, Scrahanagullaun, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing slope in Scrahanagullaun, a quiet townland in County Kerry, three stones have been standing in rough alignment for several thousand years.

One of them has since fallen, and now lies flat in the pasture grass, but the arrangement as a whole still reads clearly as a deliberate human construction: a stone row, oriented along a northeast-southwest axis, planted into the hillside at a time when such alignments appear to have held cosmological or ritual significance.

Stone rows are a recurring feature of the Kerry landscape, part of a broader Bronze Age tradition found across the southwest of Ireland. This example is modest in scale but precise in its recorded geometry. The two upright stones each stand 1.51 metres tall, spaced roughly two metres apart. The prostrate stone, which lies 2.5 metres to the southwest of the middle stone, is the longest of the three at just over two metres, and may have fallen at some point after erection, or possibly never been raised at all, though that remains a matter of interpretation. The consistent northeast-southwest alignment is typical of the Kerry tradition, where such orientations are often linked to solar events, particularly sunrise and sunset at the solstices or equinoxes, though no specific astronomical function has been confirmed for this site. What can be said with confidence is that someone, at some point in prehistory, chose this particular slope, gathered these particular stones, and set them out with clear intention.

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