Stone circle, Meenanare, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Stone Monuments
Some places earn their place in the archaeological record not by surviving but by disappearing.
At Meenanare in County Kerry, a stone circle once stood that is now so thoroughly gone that not a single stone remains in situ. It is, in the bluntest possible terms, an absence with a map reference.
The circle appears, labelled plainly as 'Stone Circle', on Ordnance Survey maps from 1841 to 1842 and again on the 1915 revision, which tells us that it was at least still considered worth marking into the early twentieth century. At some point between that second survey and the present, it was broken down, the stones presumably put to use elsewhere, as so often happened when field walls needed building or farm tracks needed levelling. Stone circles of this type are broadly prehistoric in origin, associated across Ireland and Britain with ritual and ceremonial use, though the precise purpose of any individual example is rarely recoverable. What survives at Meenanare is the name in ink, twice over, and nothing else on the ground.