Standing stone, Cooracoosane, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Standing stone, Cooracoosane, Co. Kerry

At the head of the Kealduff river valley in County Kerry, close to the southern shore of Lough Brin, there is a standing stone that does not appear on Ordnance Survey maps.

That absence is telling. Plenty of prehistoric monuments across Ireland have slipped through the cartographic record, but there is something quietly affecting about a stone that has been standing in the same spot for thousands of years without ever acquiring an official dot on a map. It is not lost, exactly; it simply exists outside the usual systems of notation.

The stone itself is a subrectangular block, meaning its cross-section is roughly rectangular with slightly irregular edges, standing 1.35 metres high and with a base measuring 0.85 metres by 0.55 metres. It is oriented roughly north-north-west to south-south-east. Its lower section is weathered and overgrown, as you might expect of something that has been rooted in boggy Kerry ground for millennia. Standing stones of this type are prehistoric monuments, erected during the Bronze Age or possibly earlier, though their precise purpose remains debated; they may have marked boundaries, burial sites, astronomical alignments, or ritual landscapes, and in most cases the evidence no longer survives to say with certainty. What survives here is the stone itself, set against the backdrop of the Iveragh Peninsula, one of the more archaeologically dense corners of south Kerry. The site was documented by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their 1996 archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press, which catalogued a landscape layered with prehistoric and early medieval remains.

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