Standing stone - pair, Kilnabrack, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone – pair, Kilnabrack, Co. Kerry

Two stones stand in flat pastureland near Kilnabrack in County Kerry, overlooking Rossbehy Creek to the north, and for much of their recorded history only one of them was officially acknowledged.

Ordnance Survey maps marked a single gallaun, the Irish term for a standing stone, at this location, leaving the second upright effectively invisible to cartographers and, by extension, to anyone relying on those maps alone.

The pair are aligned northeast to southwest, a orientation shared by many prehistoric stone pairs across Munster, though what that alignment signified to the people who erected them remains genuinely uncertain. The northeast stone is the more imposing of the two, rising to 2.85 metres and measuring 1.8 metres by 0.8 metres at its base; it is irregular in elevation, giving it a rough, uneven silhouette rather than the clean shaft sometimes associated with standing stones. Over time it has been partly absorbed into a modern field boundary, which is not unusual for prehistoric monuments in agricultural landscapes, where ancient uprights become convenient anchors for later fencing and walls. The second stone, 2.9 metres to the southwest, is considerably smaller, standing just 0.75 metres high and measuring 0.6 metres by 0.55 metres at its base. Its upper surface has been damaged at some point, which may partly explain the disparity in height between the two, though the original difference in scale was likely always pronounced. The site was documented by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their 1996 archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press, which brought both stones into the formal record together for the first time.

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