Standing stone, Spunkane, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Spunkane, Co. Kerry

In the marshy ground south of Knag ridge on the Iveragh Peninsula, a roughly triangular standing stone rises just over a metre from the earth, unacknowledged by the Ordnance Survey maps that chart everything around it.

That absence from the official cartographic record is itself a small puzzle, given that standing stones, erected during prehistory as markers, ritual sites, or boundary indicators, are usually among the more diligently logged features of the Irish landscape. This one simply never made it onto the sheet.

The stone is irregular in shape, which is not unusual for the type, but its geometry is notably consistent: it presents a roughly triangular outline both at its base and in its vertical profile, tapering upward from a broad footprint measuring approximately 1.3 metres by 1.05 metres at its widest points, with a narrower face of around 0.57 metres. Its recorded height is 1.17 metres. It sits in level marshy land, the kind of low-lying ground that would have been significant to the people who placed it there, whether as a territorial marker, a point of ritual assembly, or something whose purpose has long since become opaque. The Iveragh Peninsula, which forms the largest of the great fingers of land jutting into the Atlantic from south-west Kerry, is dense with prehistoric remains, and this stone is one of the less celebrated among them.

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