Stone row, Toornanaunagh, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Stone Monuments

Stone row, Toornanaunagh, Co. Kerry

Of the three stones that make up this prehistoric alignment in Toornanaunagh, two are now lying flat.

Only one remains upright, rising to 2.2 metres above the rough upland pasture, and it is on the eastern face of this survivor that someone, at some unknown point in the past, left what have been described as 'rock scribblings', a phrase that covers everything from cup marks to more elaborate carved motifs and which, in either case, suggests the stone mattered to people long after it was first erected.

The row appears to run NNE to SSW, a directional alignment that recurs across many Irish and British prehistoric stone rows, though whether that reflects astronomical intention, territorial marking, or something else entirely remains genuinely unresolved. The upright stone and the prostrate middle stone are separated by 1.5 metres, and the same gap separates the middle stone from the NNE stone at the far end. The two fallen stones are considerably larger in footprint than the upright, each measuring 2.4 metres in length. A Kilcummin entry from the Ordnance Survey Name Books of the 1840s, a set of field observations compiled during the first large-scale mapping of Ireland, records a 'remarkable stone which stands perpendicular' measuring roughly four feet square and six feet high, dimensions that correspond closely to the surviving upright and suggest it was already a local landmark well before archaeological terminology caught up with it.

The site sits in open upland grazing ground, with unobstructed views in all directions, which is fairly typical for Kerry stone rows, many of which occupy exposed, elevated positions across the peninsula's interior. The 'rock scribblings' noted by Casey in 1998 are on the eastern face of the upright stone, which is worth bearing in mind when approaching, as carvings on weathered Kerry sandstone can be easy to miss in flat or overcast light.

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