Standing stone, Lisbabe, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Stone Monuments
On a low hillock in a Kerry pasture, just to the south-east of a farmstead, a single upright stone has been standing long enough that almost everything about its original purpose has been forgotten.
It is subrectangular in plan, roughly 1.6 metres wide and just over half a metre deep at the base, and it tapers as it rises to a height of 1.55 metres. That tapering profile is fairly typical of Irish standing stones, a broad category covering prehistoric monoliths erected anywhere from the Neolithic through to the early Bronze Age, though in most individual cases the precise date and reason for erection remain unknown. They appear across the Irish landscape in their hundreds, sometimes solitary, sometimes in loose alignments, occasionally near burial sites or territorial boundaries.
The stone at Lisbabe sits quietly in that large and unresolved category. Its dimensions are modest but not insignificant; at 1.55 metres tall it would have been clearly visible above the surrounding grassland, which may or may not have been the point. Whether it once marked a grave, a boundary, a routeway, or something else entirely is not recorded. What remains is the stone itself, slightly tapered, planted in a hillock, and still upright in a field in County Kerry.