Rock art, Drummin, Co. Wicklow

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Drummin, Co. Wicklow

On a steep south-facing slope above the Keocha Brook in County Wicklow, a granite boulder sits only partially clear of the ground, its surface tilting gently downhill with the angle of the slope.

What makes it worth attention are the 24 cup marks scattered across it, each a shallow, smoothly worked hollow between five and ten centimetres across and up to five centimetres deep. Cup marks are among the oldest and least understood forms of prehistoric rock art found in Ireland, simple circular depressions pecked into stone surfaces, probably during the Neolithic or Bronze Age, though their purpose remains genuinely unclear. This example is modest in scale, the exposed face measuring little more than a metre east to west, but the cup marks themselves are described as well-defined, which suggests they have survived the centuries in reasonable condition despite the stone being mostly buried.

The boulder was noted briefly by the historian and place-name scholar Liam Price as far back as 1933, making it one of the earlier recorded examples of rock art in Wicklow. Price was a diligent chronicler of the county's antiquities, and his passing reference kept the site in the record long enough for it to be properly documented in later years. More recently, the Wicklow Rock Art Project, based in the School of Archaeology at University College Dublin and led by Dr. Clíodhna Ní Lionáin, produced a photogrammetric three-dimensional model of the stone. Photogrammetry works by combining overlapping photographs to generate a precise digital surface, allowing researchers to measure and study the cup marks without repeated visits to a site that sits on a steep, partially overgrown slope.

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