Stone circle, Scartaglin, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Stone circle, Scartaglin, Co. Kerry

On a level shelf cut into a steep southeast-facing slope near Scartaglin in County Kerry, four stones sit in a rough horseshoe arrangement open to the north, with a fifth standing apart some two metres to the southwest.

It is that gap to the north, and the solitary outlier stone, that make this site unusual. Most prehistoric stone circles in Kerry are closed rings; this one is not quite a circle at all, and the outlier suggests a more deliberate spatial logic than a simple enclosure.

The site was documented in detail by O'Hare in 1996, with each stone measured and described individually. Three of the four main stones are still upright; the fourth lies flat, measuring just over a metre in length. The standing stones range from 80 centimetres to just over a metre in height, modest in scale but carefully positioned. The outlier to the southwest is the tallest of all, reaching 1.25 metres, rectangular in section and aligned east-west. Together, the four enclosing stones define an interior space roughly three metres north to south and 2.6 metres east to west, small enough that the arrangement feels intimate rather than ceremonial in any grand sense. A scatter of other stones lies around the site, but these are thought to be the result of later field clearance rather than original features. The monument sits in rough mountain pasture, on that level break in the slope, and looks out over open rolling land to the east and south, a wide prospect that would have been equally visible from this spot whenever the stones were first raised.

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