Stone row, Derrylicka, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Stone row, Derrylicka, Co. Kerry

On the lower south-western slopes of Knocklomena mountain in County Kerry, a small row of prehistoric standing stones sits in a landscape it has occupied for millennia, unacknowledged by the Ordnance Survey maps that chart everything around it.

Stone rows, a monument type found across Bronze Age Ireland and Britain, typically consist of two or more upright stones set in a line, often aligned with solar or lunar events, though their precise purpose remains a matter of debate among archaeologists. This particular example is quietly anomalous even within that already puzzling category: a modern field boundary runs straight through it, bisecting the row and incorporating one of its stones into the wall itself.

The row consists of three stones oriented roughly north-north-west to south-south-east, spaced about 2.6 metres apart. Two remain upright and are roughly rectangular in profile, measuring approximately 1.2 metres and 1 metre in height respectively. The northernmost stone has fallen and lies prostrate on the far side of the field boundary, about 2 metres from the next stone in the sequence. Tucked between that fallen stone and the boundary wall lie two smaller prostrate slabs whose relationship to the row is uncertain; they may be associated with the original monument, or they may not. The whole arrangement looks west across the valley of the Kealduff river, a placement that feels deliberate, set as it is on a lower mountain slope with open views rather than on any obvious summit or ridge. The survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996 recorded the site, noting both its components and the inconvenient fact of the wall running through it.

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