Standing stone, Cill Buaine, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Stone Monuments
On the lower southern slopes of Kilkeaveragh mountain in County Kerry, there is a small standing stone that does not appear on Ordnance Survey maps.
It simply stands there in the pasture, overlooking St Finan's Bay to the south-west, unrecorded by the cartographers who surveyed the surrounding landscape. That absence from the official map record is itself quietly telling. A stone like this, a gallaun as it is known in the Irish tradition, the term referring to a single upright standing stone of prehistoric origin, can be easy to overlook even when you know to look for it.
The stone is modest in scale, measuring roughly one metre by twenty centimetres at the base and standing 1.15 metres high. Its profile is regular and rectangular, and its longer axis runs east to west. What lifts this particular gallaun above the merely unremarkable is the presence, just 2.5 metres to its north, of a small terraced area. This platform is revetted, meaning held in place, on its southern side by a three-metre stretch of drystone walling. It is a detail that suggests some degree of deliberate shaping of the ground around the stone, though what purpose that served, whether ceremonial, agricultural, or otherwise, is not recorded. The scholar Henry noted the stone in 1957, which places it within a broader mid-twentieth-century effort to document the prehistoric monuments of the Iveragh Peninsula before they were lost entirely to memory or land improvement.