Rock art, Baile An Tsléibhe, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Baile An Tsléibhe, Co. Kerry

On a sandstone boulder beside a laneway climbing towards Mount Eagle on the Dingle Peninsula, two very different kinds of mark share the same surface, separated by centuries and perhaps by entirely different intentions.

Across the flat top of the stone runs a neat line of six cup-marks, shallow circular depressions pecked into the rock that are typical of prehistoric rock art found throughout Ireland and Atlantic Europe. Their purpose remains genuinely unknown; interpretations range from territorial marking to ritual use to astronomical alignment, and none has been settled. Then, on the gently sloping western face of the same boulder, someone at a later point incised a Latin cross enclosed within a lozenge-shaped frame rising from a stepped base, a motif that reads as early Christian. The two sets of marks sit roughly eighteen centimetres apart, and the question of whether the cross was deliberately placed in relation to the older cup-marks, perhaps to Christianise a site already considered significant, is one that the stone itself cannot answer.

The boulder is a substantial piece of work: roughly 5.6 metres north to south, 2.8 metres east to west, and just over a metre at its highest point, smooth and unfractured. It sits at about 54 metres above sea level in a slight depression at the south-east corner of a field of improved rough pasture, partially incorporated into a drystone field wall that defines the laneway running to the south. The cup-marks themselves are small, between 5.5 and 7 centimetres in diameter and between 4 and 14 millimetres deep, and a seventh, isolated mark sits about 86 centimetres to the north of the main group. The boulder and its markings were documented as part of the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey published by J. Cuppage in 1986. Much of the upper surface of the stone is currently obscured by field clearance stones, sod, and grass, which means the decorated area is only partially visible without some effort to locate it.

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