Rock art, An Chathair Bhearnach, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, An Chathair Bhearnach, Co. Kerry

Mortared into the boundary wall of a private house at An Chathair Bhearnach in County Kerry, a small sandstone slab carries some of the oldest marks human hands made in this landscape.

The stone measures roughly 33 by 19 centimetres, smooth and unfractured, and its entire face is covered in prehistoric rock art: cup-and-ring motifs, which are shallow circular depressions carved into the stone surrounded by one or more concentric rings, along with radial grooves extending outward from the central cups. Around these more elaborate carvings, approximately nineteen simple cupmarks, plain hemispherical hollows with no surrounding rings, are densely distributed across the surface. The lower portion of the stone disappears below a concrete footpath, so part of what was originally carved there remains hidden from view.

The stone's prehistory, in both senses, is uncertain. It was already displaced from its original context by the time anyone began paying close attention to it. An observer named O'Malley, working for the Office of Public Works in 1937, noted a 'marked stone' in the vicinity, and this is very likely the same piece, though no record survives of where it stood before it was incorporated into the wall. The principal motifs, a cup enclosed by two penannular rings with a long radial groove, and further cup-and-ring combinations with curved radial grooves, are characteristic of prehistoric rock art found across Atlantic Europe, typically associated with the Neolithic or Early Bronze Age, though the meaning and function of such carvings remain genuinely unresolved. The stone sits on a north-west-facing wall at roughly 38 metres above sea level, well maintained despite its modest and decidedly domestic setting on the Iveragh Peninsula.

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