Rock art, Baile An Mhuilinn, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a gentle slope above the northern shore of Dingle Harbour, two large sandstone slabs lie flat in rough pasture, and one of them is covered in carvings that nobody has fully explained.
This is prehistoric rock art of the cup-and-ring variety, a form found across Atlantic Europe in which shallow circular hollows, sometimes ringed and sometimes connected by grooves, are pecked into stone surfaces. What makes this particular stone quietly puzzling is a detail noticed by researcher Finlay in 1973: the linear grooves that decorate its surface follow the downward slope of the eastern face, which suggests the carving was done after the stone had already fallen. If scholar Ó Nualláin's 1978 reading is correct, and both stones were originally upright, then whoever made the art was not decorating a standing monument but an already-collapsed one, adding marks to a surface that had become, in effect, a floor.
The decorated stone measures roughly 4.1 metres by 1.75 metres and carries at least twenty-five isolated cup-marks, small hemispherical depressions averaging five to seven centimetres across, along with seven cup-and-ring motifs concentrated along the upper portion of the stone. One of these rings is penannular, meaning it does not fully close, and another takes the form of a slight spiral. Two of the cup-and-ring motifs are joined by a curvilinear groove. In the centre of the stone, two cup-marks are worked into a more complex arrangement of intersecting straight and curved lines. The companion stone lying immediately to the west is slightly smaller and bears no decoration at all. The site does not stand in isolation: a single standing stone sits roughly 20 metres to the south-west, and a pair of standing stones lies about 50 metres to the north, suggesting a broader prehistoric landscape concentrated in this corner of the Dingle Peninsula. The site was at one point mistakenly included in a list of cist-graves, a confusion traced back to a mix-up with another site entirely.
The stones lie close to the R559 Dingle to Ventry road, set back about 20 metres to the north of it on low-lying pasture. Grey and white lichens obscure parts of the carved surface, and some damage is visible on the underside of the decorated stone at its northern end, though the surface overall remains reasonably intact. The Discovery Programme has produced a detailed three-dimensional digital model of the rock art panel, which allows the motifs to be examined at a level of detail difficult to achieve from ground level.