Rock art, Carrickmines, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Settlement Sites
Somewhere beneath the roar of the M50 motorway on the southern edge of Dublin lies the origin story of three small granite boulders that carry markings old enough to predate written history by millennia.
The boulders, catalogued together under the monument reference DU026-145/147, bear cup-marks, which are shallow circular depressions pecked into stone by prehistoric people whose precise intentions remain unknown. What makes their presence quietly remarkable is the circumstance of their discovery: they came to light not through dedicated fieldwork, but because a motorway was being built through Carrickmines.
The boulders were uncovered during archaeological investigations carried out along the route of the South-Eastern Motorway, as recorded by Clinton in 2002 and 2004. One of the three, known as Rock B, was examined and described in detail by Dr Muiris O'Sullivan. It is a slightly rounded granite boulder with a convex face measuring 0.60 metres by 0.48 metres, roughly the surface area of a large chopping board. A fault line runs along the centre of that face for approximately half its length, and at least nine cup-marks are visible, generally clustered near the centre and arranged in two loose arcs, with a single outlier sitting apart from the group. Three of the marks fall along the fault line itself, which raises a genuine interpretive question: O'Sullivan noted that these three might conceivably be natural rather than human-made. The full excavation findings were published in a four-volume report compiled by T. Breen in 2012 on behalf of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, the product of work carried out under ministerial directions and archaeological licences.
These boulders are not accessible as a standing field monument in the way that a megalithic tomb or a hillfort might be; they were recovered during a road scheme, and their current location and display status would need to be confirmed with the relevant county council or the National Monuments Service before a visit is planned. Anyone with a serious interest in the material would do well to consult the Breen 2012 report directly, which includes detailed drawings of the rock art. The cup-mark tradition in Ireland is widespread but poorly understood, and even a small cluster of nine marks on a worn granite face carries the same fundamental puzzle as the grandest decorated kerb stone: nobody knows with certainty what they meant to the people who made them.