Rock art, An Choill Mhór, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, An Choill Mhór, Co. Kerry

At ground level in a rough pasture above An Choill Mhór, a flat sandstone outcrop sits so flush with the surrounding soil that a person could easily step across it without a second glance.

What stops the informed eye is a small cluster of five cupmarks, each no wider than fifteen millimetres and only two or three millimetres deep, pressed into a subrectangular patch of the rock's surface roughly nine centimetres across. Cupmarks are among the oldest and most widespread forms of prehistoric rock art found in Ireland, shallow circular depressions pecked or ground into stone, whose precise purpose remains genuinely unknown. Here, the cluster sits slightly off-centre to the south of the decorated area, with linear grooves of uncertain origin disappearing beneath a thin covering of sod and moss to the north-northeast.

The outcrop itself is sandstone, smooth and unfractured, measuring about 1.35 metres east to west and 0.34 metres north to south, with a slight tilt toward the north-northeast. It lies at roughly 90 metres above sea level on a northwest-facing slope, in the shadow of Slievanea mountain to the southwest. The situation is telling, or at least suggestive: to the west, north, and northeast, the ground opens up to broad views of the Brandon Mountain range, Brandon Bay, and the Maharee Islands, while Lough Adoon waterfall is visible to the south-southeast. Whether the people who made these marks were drawn by that particular panorama, or whether the landscape orientation meant nothing to them at all, is one of the many questions this kind of art quietly refuses to answer.

The decorated surface is small enough that it rewards patience and a low angle of light, which tends to throw the shallow cupmarks into relief far more effectively than midday sun. The linear grooves partly obscured by vegetation to the northeast may or may not be related to the cupmarks; their origin remains unresolved.

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