Standing stone, Tinnies, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Tinnies, Co. Kerry

One stone is standing; the other has been lying in the grass for so long that the sod has almost swallowed it whole.

Together, the two slabs at Tinnies on the Iveragh Peninsula represent what was once, most likely, a paired portal arrangement, a set of upright stones framing the inner side of an entrance to some now-vanished or unexcavated structure. The surviving upright, labelled "Gallaun" on Ordnance Survey maps, a term used in Irish for a single standing stone, rises 1.54 metres from the ground and measures roughly 95 centimetres by 30 centimetres at its base, oriented on a northwest to southeast axis. Its fallen companion, about 1.6 metres in length, lies prostrate just 1.5 metres to the east, almost entirely concealed beneath the turf.

The interpretation of these slabs as portal stones, rather than freestanding monuments in their own right, comes from archaeological survey work carried out on the Iveragh Peninsula and published by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan through Cork University Press in 1996. Portal stones, when set in pairs at an entrance, would have marked a threshold, whether into an enclosure, a tomb, or some other defined space. That the second stone has collapsed and been gradually absorbed into the ground makes it easy to read the site as simply a lone standing stone, which is perhaps why the OS maps single out only the upright for labelling. The relationship between the two slabs, and what they once framed, is the quietly puzzling part.

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