Standing stone, Baile Dháith, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Stone Monuments
Some ancient monuments survive against all odds; others simply disappear.
A standing stone that once occupied a gentle slope above the Feohanagh river estuary on the Dingle Peninsula belongs firmly to the second category. Recorded as standing roughly five feet high and nearly a foot thick, it occupied gently sloping pastureland about a hundred metres north of the river mouth, with Smerwick Harbour opening out to the south-west below it. No visible trace of it survives today.
Standing stones are among the most enigmatic features of the Irish prehistoric landscape. Erected most commonly during the Bronze Age, they served purposes that remain genuinely uncertain, ranging from boundary markers and memorial stones to astronomical or ritual functions. Whatever this particular stone's original purpose, its position above the Feohanagh estuary and overlooking Smerwick Harbour would have placed it at a locally significant junction of land and water. The stone's dimensions were captured in the Ordnance Survey Name Books for the parish of Kilquane, and later noted by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, "Corca Dhuibhne", which catalogued the extraordinary density of prehistoric and early medieval monuments across this part of west Kerry. By the time more recent fieldwork revisited the site, there was nothing left to see.