Standing stone - pair, Mullen, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Stone Monuments
Two low stones sit close together on a marshy Kerry hillside, aligned east to west and separated by less than a metre, their difference in character oddly pronounced for such modest monuments.
The westerly stone is flat-topped and roughly rectangular in section, while its companion to the south-east tapers to a more pointed profile. Neither reaches much above knee height. That deliberate pairing, two stones placed in careful relation to one another rather than a single upright, is what sets sites like this apart from the more familiar solitary standing stones scattered across the Irish landscape.
The pair occupy a break in a south-facing slope on wet, marshy upland in the townland of Mullen, on or near the slopes of Slievebrickan to the west. A survey by O'Hare in 1996 recorded their dimensions precisely: the western stone measures 65 centimetres in height, 75 in breadth, and 35 in width; the eastern stone is slightly taller at 70 centimetres and broader at 80 centimetres, but narrower at 25. The east-west alignment the two share is the kind of detail that has long prompted debate about prehistoric standing stones in Ireland, with some researchers connecting such orientations to solar events, though the evidence for deliberate astronomical alignment at any individual site is rarely conclusive. What is clear is that whoever raised these stones chose the position with some care. The ground opens out here to give a wide view across low-lying land to the south-east, south, and south-west, a vantage that would have been no less apparent in prehistory than it is now.