Rock art, Teeromoyle, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
A small block of green sandstone, roughly the size of a large hardback book, carries prehistoric carvings on every one of its four long faces.
That total coverage is unusual. Most examples of prehistoric rock art in Ireland are decorated on a single surface, often a flat outcrop or a boulder face. This stone, lying flat at the edge of a farmyard on the Iveragh Peninsula in Co. Kerry, was apparently worked all the way around, which strongly suggests it was once intended to stand upright, functioning as a pillar stone, with its decoration visible from multiple directions.
The motifs belong to the tradition known as cup-and-ring art, a form of abstract carving found across Atlantic Europe and dating broadly to the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods. Cup-and-ring marks consist of a shallow hemispherical depression, the cup, surrounded by one or more incised concentric rings, sometimes with a radial groove running outward from the ring to the edge of the stone. On this particular piece, one face carries six interconnecting rings arranged around a central cup-and-ring, with three grooves radiating outward to the edges of the stone. The two narrower side faces each have a circular motif formed by pickmarks, paired with a radial groove and a plain cupmark. A fourth face has been partially broken, but enough survives to show a further cup-and-ring motif; an illustration by the scholar R. A. S. Macalister records that a similar motif once occupied the section that is now lost. According to research by Connolly in 1991, the stone is reputed to have been found originally within a cairn, a mound of stones that typically covered a prehistoric burial, which raises the possibility that the pillar was eventually reused in a funerary context, or that the cairn itself was associated with a standing stone from the outset.
The stone currently lies on the ground beside a rubble stone building at the eastern edge of a farmyard, close to a minor road, with the carvings partially obscured by weathering and moss growth. The motifs are shallow to begin with, some only two or three millimetres deep, so close inspection in raking light, ideally in the low sun of early morning or late afternoon, gives the best chance of reading the full composition across all four faces.