Rock art, An Choill Mhór, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, An Choill Mhór, Co. Kerry

In the rough pasture above An Choill Mhór, a small sandstone boulder sits in the grass looking, to any passing eye, like nothing more than a broken piece of field stone.

It barely clears the ground, rising to a maximum height of thirty centimetres, and its decorated surface faces south-south-west at an angle that catches little attention. What makes it remarkable is carved into the rock itself: two cup-and-ring motifs, a form of prehistoric art in which a shallow circular depression, the cup, is surrounded by one or more incised concentric rings. Nobody knows with certainty what these symbols meant to the people who made them, but they appear across Atlantic Europe from the Neolithic into the Bronze Age, and finding them here, on a fractured slab in County Kerry, places this unassuming field in a very long conversation.

The two motifs sit roughly twelve centimetres apart, divided by a narrow natural fracture in the stone. The larger of the pair, positioned to the north-west, measures sixteen centimetres across in total, with a cup ten centimetres in diameter and a ring carved to a depth of about three millimetres. The second, towards the south-east, is noticeably smaller and considerably fainter, its ring worn to a depth of two to three millimetres and its cup only six centimetres wide. The stone itself is smooth sandstone, subtriangular on its decorated face, and the whole slab measures roughly three quarters of a metre in its longest dimension. It was first identified as rock art by Mícheál Ó Coileáin, Heritage Officer with Kerry County Council, in an unpublished MA thesis completed in 2006, which means it entered the formal record relatively recently despite sitting in open pasture all along.

The stone lies about eight metres east of a local trackway and roughly seventy-five metres south of the R560, at an elevation of seventy-eight metres above sea level on a north-west-facing slope. From that position, the view opens across to the Brandon Mountain range, Brandon Bay, and the Maharee Islands stretching away to the north and north-east, with Slievanea mountain rising to the south-west. Whether the carved stone was ever meant to engage with that landscape, or whether its placement is coincidental, is one of those questions prehistoric rock art persistently refuses to answer.

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