Rock art, Ardbeg, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
In the south-west corner of Stradbally graveyard on the Dingle Peninsula, a sandstone slab lies pressed against a box tomb and the graveyard wall, half-claimed by encroaching ivy.
It is not obviously remarkable, measuring roughly 1.75 metres in length and not much more than 30 centimetres at its highest point. But on its flat upper surface, towards the southern end, someone long ago ground out a single shallow hollow, about 7.5 centimetres across and 2 centimetres deep. This is a cup-mark, the simplest and most common form of prehistoric rock art: a deliberately carved circular depression whose exact purpose remains genuinely unknown, though such marks appear across Atlantic Europe and are generally associated with the Bronze Age or earlier.
What makes this stone quietly unsettling is the layering of time around it. The Moriarty grave immediately to the west is dated 1904, and Stradbally Church stands close to the north-east. The carved slab, meanwhile, predates the graveyard, the church, and almost certainly any settled Christian presence on this stretch of the Kerry coast. It sits about 0.7 kilometres south-east of Brandon Bay, on level ground at around 8 metres above sea level, with low-lying pasture in the surrounding fields and Lough Gill roughly 560 metres to the north-east. The stone was recorded as part of J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, the Dingle Peninsula, and subsequent work by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly produced the more detailed measurements now on record. Whether the slab was brought into the graveyard at some point or whether the graveyard simply grew up around it is not recorded.
The cup-mark itself is described as well-preserved, a small oval depression barely larger than a person's fist, cut into smooth fractured sandstone. For something so minimal, it has survived an extraordinary length of time, outlasting whatever ritual or practical meaning it once carried, and is now neighboured by nineteenth-century headstones and slowly disappearing beneath ivy at its edges.