Rock art, Baile An Ásaigh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Baile An Ásaigh, Co. Kerry

Two boulders sat face down and face up in a Kerry field for an unknown stretch of millennia, their carved surfaces quietly accumulating soil, until a digger broke ground in August 1982 and brought them back into the light.

The motifs cut into them belong to a tradition known as prehistoric rock art: cup-and-ring marks, which are exactly what they sound like, a central cuplike depression surrounded by one or more carved concentric rings. They appear across Atlantic Europe and are generally associated with the Neolithic or early Bronze Age, though their precise purpose remains genuinely unresolved. What makes the Baile An Ásaigh pair quietly odd is the contrast between them: one was buried decorated side up, the other decorated side down, as though they had been laid to rest rather than simply abandoned.

The larger of the two is a substantial sandstone slab, roughly 2.34 metres by 2.24 metres, carrying eleven cup-and-ring motifs and a single isolated cup-mark across less than half its surface. Some of the rings appear gapped or incomplete, though this may simply be the result of long weathering rather than any deliberate design choice. The smaller boulder, considerably more modest at 0.88 metres by 0.66 metres, carries a single motif near the edge of one face: a cup surrounded by three rings, with the outer circles pulling towards an oval. Both stones were found under only about 0.2 metres of soil in a level field on the eastern side of the valley running north-east from Dingle Town, and both are now propped against a drystone field boundary. The site sits on a west-south-west facing slope at around 82 metres above sea level, with Ballysitteragh mountain to the north, Sugar Loaf hill to the north-east, and a clear view south-west towards Dingle Harbour. The larger stone now rests against a field wall, its carved face turned north-east, partly obscured by lichen growth, with machinery marks still visible from the moment of its unearthing.

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