Standing stone, Ballynakilly, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Ballynakilly, Co. Kerry

Some places on a map mark something that no longer exists above ground.

At Ballynakilly in County Kerry, the second edition of the Ordnance Survey recorded a feature labelled "Gallaun", the Irish term for a standing stone, a single upright megalith usually dating to the Bronze Age and erected for purposes that remain genuinely unclear to archaeologists. It stood just south of where the Inny and Owroe rivers meet, a confluence that would have made it a reasonably legible landmark in the landscape for centuries. By the time researchers came to verify it, the land had been ploughed, and there is no visible trace of the stone remaining.

The site was documented as part of a comprehensive archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996. That survey catalogued the remarkable density of prehistoric and early medieval monuments across south Kerry, a region whose relative remoteness had allowed many such features to survive longer than elsewhere in Ireland. The Ballynakilly gallaun was among them, at least on paper. Agricultural improvement, in this case ploughing, is one of the most common causes of monument loss across Ireland, capable of breaking up or burying stonework that had stood undisturbed for millennia. Whether the stone was toppled, buried, or removed entirely is not recorded.

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