Rock art, An Choill Mhór, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, An Choill Mhór, Co. Kerry

On a north-west-facing slope of rough pasture in County Kerry, a sandstone outcrop holds a single, faint mark that easily goes unnoticed: a cup-and-ring motif, measuring just seventeen centimetres across in total, carved into the western edge of the stone's upper surface.

Cup-and-ring markings are among the most widespread forms of prehistoric rock art found across Atlantic Europe, consisting of a small circular depression, the cup, surrounded by one or more incised concentric rings. Here the cup itself is only seven centimetres in diameter and barely six millimetres deep, and the ring is worn to roughly a millimetre's depth. It is, by any measure, a subtle thing, and it survives in the face of considerable odds.

The outcrop sits at around eighty-nine metres above sea level on the slopes that fall away from Slievanea mountain to the south-west, with open views north-westward across Brandon Bay to the Brandon Mountain range and the Maharee Islands beyond. The stone, a fractured sandstone block roughly 2.7 metres long and 0.9 metres high, is arranged in three naturally formed layers, giving it a conspicuous, almost architectural quality in an otherwise unassuming field. The upper surface is actively flaking away in thin sheets, the result of repeated freeze-thaw cycles working into the grain of the rock. That ongoing deterioration matters, because it raises the possibility that other motifs once existed on the same surface and have since been lost entirely. A related rock art site lies roughly fifty-five metres to the north-north-west, suggesting this area of Kerry once held a modest concentration of marked stones, most of which time and weather have almost certainly erased.

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