Stones and stories tie the past to the present
A NEW photograph record of the standing stones on the Dingle Peninsula – along with stories about how people relate to the stones – will be launched on Saturday in Dingle.
The work of Ventry resident Cyril Harrington the digital book ‘Dingle’s Tall Stones and Short Stories’ is filled with over 500 evocative images of more than 150 standing stones located in townlands from Annagh to Ardcanacht and Com Dhineol to Mount Brandon. The stones have graced the West Kerry landscape for thousands of years.
Dublin born Cyril is a former businessman who brought a lifelong interest in photography and archaeology with him when he moved to Ventry in 2002. He started work on the book six years ago, setting out to create an up to date pictorial record of the standing stones in West Kerry. The prohibitive cost of producing a high-quality printed book steered him in the direction of electronic publishing.
To add a broader interest to the book he started gathering stories from locals and this then expanded to include people who had moved into the area. The result is a comprehensive pictorial record of the stones and in some ways a social study of West Kerry in the 21st Century.
The stories are provided by a selection of people who form the present day population of West Kerry – a potpourri of natives and those who were born as far away as Morocco, Nigeria and Lithuania. Each person is paired with a stone and the book incluides profile pictures of the people as well as pictures of the front an rear of the stones with each of the photographs captioned with the dimensions of the stone and the townland name in Irish and English.
The most comprehensive collection of standing stones on the Dingle Peninsula is how Cyril describes the book, and it is clear that he took the work very seriosuly. This involved returning repeatedly to photograph stones in a particular light to capture their ancient markings in greater detail. It was in the course of his tenth visit to a stone in Baile an Fhásaigh that his photographs revealed a series of three crosses that had previously gone unnoticed and were described as an exciting discovery in an article published in Archaeology Ireland magazine.
Cyril is full of praise for the farmers who allowed him onto their land to photograph stones and went out of their way to assist with the process of recording them. “Every landowner, every farmer, without a single exception granted me access to their property,” he said. “Often cutting away briars and in some cases standing up stones that had fallen over.”
Described as “a work of patient study that succeeds in drawing meaning from the shadows of time” the ebook “Dingle’s Tall Stones and Short Stories” is for sale on Amazon. com. It will be launched on this Saturday, September 6, in Strand House, Dingle, at 6.45pm and everyone is welcome to attend.