Rock art, Cahernaman, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Cahernaman, Co. Kerry

In the boggy uplands of Cahernaman, a sandstone boulder roughly the size of a large dining table lies half-sunk in rough, waterlogged terrain.

Its upper surface is so thickly coated in lichen and so worn by millennia of Kerry weather that the carvings covering it are almost invisible to a casual eye. Almost, but not quite. Lean in close and the prehistoric markings begin to resolve: shallow grooves, picked lines, and the distinctive concentric geometry of cup-and-ring motifs, a form of abstract carving found across Atlantic Europe and the British Isles during the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods, typically consisting of a central cupmark, a small hemispherical hollow, encircled by one or more incised rings.

The boulder measures roughly 1.9 metres by 1.7 metres and stands up to 1.2 metres high, its long axis running northeast to southwest. A shallow natural step, only about three centimetres high, divides the upper surface roughly in half, and the carvers appear to have worked on both sides of this feature, incorporating it into the composition rather than avoiding it. North of the step, four parallel grooves run perpendicular to it, spaced about two centimetres apart, and a cup-and-ring motif sits between the first and second groove. Photogrammetry, a technique that uses overlapping photographs to build precise three-dimensional models of surfaces, has revealed that some of these grooves extend considerably further than they appear to the naked eye. South of the step, the arrangement grows more complex: lines converge on a narrow sub-rectangular ring, some partly defined by natural cracks in the stone, with further cupmarks, curvilinear lines, and clusters of picking spreading towards the boulder's edges. One cupmark is actually truncated by the panel's edge, suggesting the carved surface once continued beyond what survives, or that the carver was working right to the limit of usable stone. A second, larger boulder to the south appears uncarved. From the site, Dingle Bay is visible to the north-northwest.

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