After rubbing my eyes, however, I can now see the “fort” in question. The above stone is also barely detectable (by its shadow) not too far away at some co-ordinates or other.

52 degrees, 14′47.87 N
9 degrees, 59′41.37 W

I saw an off-license with a decent beer selection.

Perhaps it manifests according to the wishes of the beholder - did Google Earth show you, I dunno, Dana winning Eurovision in 1970 or something?

{har har!}

Fergal, You refer, of course, to the early Christian legend of “St. Brigid, the dove of the Holy Spirit, and the visit of the Midnight Owl”. Sure isn’t it taught to every chiddler in Ireland? It still puts terrors up me to this day.

Isn’t it a remarkable thing to contemplate, that if the same defacement had taken place 1500 years ago we’d all be delighted with it?

Well the use/function of such monuments/sites wasn’t ever really static and fixed. Was actually chatting about just that to our visiting pals as we drove back to Limerick.

Take Newgrange and its spiral designs for example. It’s popularly imagined as an iconic “Celtic” monument even though it pre-dates Celtic Ireland by (to the best of my knowledge) a couple of thousand years. How did the “Celts” interpret/use it? Were their interactions with it “authentic”? These questions aren’t always easy to answer.

Having said that, a late 20th century cement “amendment” to an ancient standing stone probably doesn’t score high points in anyone’s authenticity stakes.

Is the BVM depicted as an owl in American Catholic iconography, I wonder?

Not as far as I know…but nice use of the acronym BVM.

Was the artist moved to make concrete (ho ho) the connection between the Irish penchant for “Marianism” and the island’s goddess-worshipping past? We may never know, but if I were the BVM I wouldn’t be too flattered by the portrait.

As I looked at the allegedly owl-like final image above I actually noticed another face gazing out at us from a crack on the stone’s left side.

Here’s a close up:

It too is smiling. This stone just gets jollier by the minute.

As for the car park sign there are two possible explanations that I can think of:
1. it is a car park, but the management use it for their beehives instead…

2. the beehive hairdo which in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s was fashionable among teenage girls who wanted to look 35 is still the height of fashion in the Dingle peninsula and those women (and others)sporting the hairdo are locally known as ‘beehives’. The problem about the beehive in the 21st century is that most cars are too low to accomodate them and it is possible that those who adhere to the fashion in the Dingle peninsula have a hole cut in the roof of their cars through which would enable them to drive without their beehives being flattened. This of course would cause security problems, the cars in question being much easier to break into, thus obliging the local authorities to provide special high security carparks. I do not know if this is the case, but if while you were on the peninsula you happened to see cars with beehive hairdos poking through the roof this would provide valuable evidence to support my theory…