Rock art, Letter, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Letter, Co. Kerry

On a gently sloping hillside above the Behy River valley in County Kerry, a sandstone boulder carries marks that were made deliberately, by human hands, at some point in prehistory.

The boulder itself is not especially dramatic: roughly two and a half metres long, fractured and weathered, sitting at around 179 metres above sea level in a landscape of cutaway bog and mountain heath, with turf banks on several sides suggesting it has been a working part of the land for centuries. What makes it unusual is what was done to its surface long before any of that, a series of small, carefully pecked marks distributed across two faces of the stone.

The technique is known as rock art, and the method used here is picking, in which a harder stone tool was used to strike or abrade the surface in repeated small blows, leaving shallow depressions each roughly five millimetres across and two millimetres deep. On the northeast-facing surface, three clusters of these pickmarks are arranged around a deep natural fissure in the rock. The main cluster, positioned centrally to the southeast of the fissure, incorporates a semi-circular arc that opens to the south and encloses further marks within it. Two smaller groupings sit to the north and west of this main composition. On the south-facing surface, a separate cluster of pickmarks appears alongside what may be a cupmark, a single rounded hollow that could be intentional or could be a product of natural weathering, the distinction is genuinely difficult to resolve. The site is not isolated in this respect; another rock art site lies approximately fourteen metres to the north-northwest, suggesting this part of the Kerry uplands was, at some point, a place people returned to and marked in a sustained way.

The motifs are faint and weathered, and the decorated surfaces are modest in scale, the larger measuring roughly forty by seventy centimetres. Nothing about the boulder announces itself. Visitors approaching across the bog, with turf banks pressing close and mountains rising on the surrounding horizons, would need to know exactly where to look.

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Pete F
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