Kenmare Stone Circle
Screened by trees a few minutes' walk from Kenmare's main streets, this Bronze Age stone circle is among the largest in the south-west of Ireland. Fifteen weathered boulders form a broad egg-shaped ring around a massive central capstone - a rare burial monument - on ground where people have gathered for perhaps three thousand years. Known locally as "the Shrubberies."
Only a few minutes on foot from the bustle of Kenmare, down a lane off Market Street, the ground opens into a quiet, tree-shaded enclosure holding one of the finest stone circles in the country. Archaeologists place it in the Bronze Age, broadly two to four thousand years old, though the site has never been excavated, so its exact age is inferred from similar monuments elsewhere in Cork and Kerry. Fifteen large boulders, two of them now fallen, stand in a slightly flattened, egg-shaped ring roughly seventeen metres across - big enough that it takes a moment to take the whole thing in.
What sets Kenmare apart from the hundred or so other circles scattered across the south-west is what sits at its heart. In the centre rests a boulder-burial: a single enormous capstone, thought to weigh several tonnes, balanced on a handful of low supporting stones. This kind of monument is almost unique to the far south of Munster, and it lends the circle a brooding, altar-like focus. The ring belongs to the region's "axial" tradition, with a low recumbent stone set opposite two taller portals, and its rough north-east to south-west orientation has led some to link it with the rising or setting sun at the solstices - an appealing idea, though unproven for this particular circle.
The setting does much of the work. Sheltered by trees, hushed and a little melancholy, it feels a world away from the town so close by. A visit takes only fifteen or twenty minutes, and the site is cared for by way of a small honesty-box contribution towards its upkeep. The path is gravel and grass and mostly level. It makes a perfect short detour on foot from Kenmare's three streets, easily combined with a coffee or a meal in town.
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