Standing stone - pair, Derreenafoyle, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone – pair, Derreenafoyle, Co. Kerry

One of these two prehistoric standing stones is still upright; the other has been lying in the undergrowth for long enough that dense overgrowth has largely swallowed it.

Together they occupy a slight but noticeable rise in otherwise marshy ground in Derreenafoyle, in the south Kerry landscape of the Iveragh Peninsula, roughly 370 metres west of the Blackwater river. The combination of one stone standing and one fallen is not unusual among paired standing stones, but the setting here has a particular quality: a low, wet, open terrain in which the prominence of even a gentle rise would have been clearly legible to whoever chose this spot, perhaps four or five thousand years ago.

The upright stone is a substantial presence, reaching 2.45 metres in height and tapering slightly towards a flat top. At its base it measures 0.8 metres by 0.47 metres, and its cross-section is triangular rather than rounded or slab-like. Its orientation runs roughly north-north-east to south-south-west, an alignment shared by many standing stones across Munster and one that has attracted considerable archaeological discussion, though its original purpose remains genuinely uncertain. Whether it marked a boundary, a route, a burial, a celestial event, or something else entirely, no one can now say with confidence. The fallen companion lies 1.5 metres to the north, longer than the upright at 2.5 metres and considerably wider at 1.35 metres; it is the larger slab, now horizontal in the overgrowth, that gives some sense of the scale of effort involved in erecting its neighbour. The pair was catalogued by Seán Ó Nualláin in 1988 and subsequently included in the archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan.

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