Rock art, Coomasaharn, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Coomasaharn, Co. Kerry

In the blanket bog above the Behy River valley in County Kerry, a sandstone rock measuring less than two metres across carries a programme of carved marks that nobody living has ever fully explained.

The surface, sitting at roughly 152 metres above sea level in a shallow depression, bears fifteen cupmarks, three cup-and-ring motifs, and a long linear groove that divides the whole composition into eastern and western halves. Cupmarks are exactly what they sound like: small, shallow, roughly circular depressions ground into rock, and when they appear ringed by one or more carved circles, as several do here, they form what archaeologists call cup-and-ring marks, among the most widespread yet least understood symbols in prehistoric Europe. Two of the ring motifs at the western end are particularly well preserved, each cupmark around five to six centimetres across, encircled by a carefully incised groove. One has a short radial line extending south and bending at a right angle; another has a hollowed area below it with its own subsidiary groove and a further cupmark nearby.

The rock itself is partially covered by sphagnum moss, peat, and water run-off where higher ground closes in to the south, west, and north, giving it a half-buried quality, as though the bog has been slowly working to reclaim it. It lies about five metres south-west of a trackway, oriented with its longer axis running east to west. The motifs to the west of the central dividing groove seem to have received the most attention from whoever carved here, with curvilinear grooves gathering the cupmarks and ring motifs into a loose composition, while the eastern portion holds two clusters of plain cupmarks, five to the south and five to the north. The site sits within the Iveragh Peninsula, a landscape already well known for its concentration of prehistoric remains, and its carved sandstone fits into a broader tradition of open-air rock art found across Atlantic Europe, generally attributed to the later Neolithic or earlier Bronze Age, though precise dating of individual sites remains difficult.

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