Rock art, Letter, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
At 166 metres above sea level, on a gentle north-east-facing slope of mountain heath and cutaway bog above the Behy river valley in County Kerry, a piece of prehistoric carving sits so close to the ground it is barely visible.
The sandstone outcrop that carries it protrudes just six centimetres above the surrounding earth, and vegetation has been quietly closing in from every side. What it holds, once found, is a single carefully worked motif: a cupmark, the kind of shallow circular depression, typically made by sustained pecking with a harder stone, that appears on prehistoric rock art across Atlantic Europe, enclosed here within a wide, dense ring of pickmarks roughly fifteen centimetres across in total. The combination is deliberate and considered, even if its original meaning has not survived alongside it.