Rock art, Coomasaharn, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Coomasaharn, Co. Kerry

On a south-east-facing slope above Coomasaharn in County Kerry, a low, flat-topped outcrop of rock carries prehistoric markings that have, in a very practical sense, gone missing.

The stone is recorded, described in reasonable detail, and assigned a grid reference, yet when researchers went looking for it, they could not find it. The pasture field sits at around 168 metres above sea level, thick with rushes and dense patches of furze, and many of the rocks in the area are buried under moss and lichen. It is, in other words, a site that exists more confidently on paper than on the ground.

What the stone is supposed to contain is worth dwelling on. Rock art of this kind, scattered across the uplands of south-west Ireland and generally attributed to the Later Neolithic or Bronze Age, typically takes the form of cupmarks, those shallow, roughly circular depressions pecked into the rock surface by hand. On this particular outcrop, measuring about 2.3 metres by 1.4 metres, the motifs are more varied than a simple scattering of cups. A meandering groove traces out a triangular area enclosing its own cupmark, and a further cupmark sits inside a penannular circle, a near-complete ring left deliberately open, with a radial line extending from it. Three plain cupmarks also appear on the stone. The whole composition is faint, which may partly explain why a furze bush at the south-east end has been allowed, over time, to encroach on it unchallenged. The detailed description comes from Aidan O'Sullivan and John Sheehan's 1996 archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press, which remains the primary record of the site.

For anyone inclined to search, the stone lies somewhere in a rushy field to the south-east of the dense furze growth noted by the surveyors who failed to locate it. The honest warning is that even equipped with a grid reference, experienced fieldworkers found nothing they could match to the original description. The large rectangular stones in the general area are the right shape but not the right size, and the vegetation has had decades to thicken further. The site's interest is real, but so is the possibility of a fruitless afternoon on a damp Kerry hillside.

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Pete F
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