Rock art, Ballinascorney Upper, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Settlement Sites
Somewhere in the uplands of Ballinascorney Upper, south County Dublin, there are two stones that may carry some of the oldest marks made by human hands in the landscape.
Or rather, there were. The precise whereabouts of this site are no longer known, which places it in a particular category of archaeological record: documented, described, and lost.
The account comes from a 1940 publication by Price, who noted a stone circle in the area south of Raheendhu, with three standing stones positioned to its east. Two of those standing stones bore cupmarks, which are shallow, roughly circular depressions ground or pecked into rock surfaces, among the most ancient and widespread forms of prehistoric rock art found across Ireland and Britain. Their meaning remains genuinely uncertain, though they appear repeatedly in association with ceremonial or ritual landscapes. Price's record gives us the location only in broad terms, tied to the nearby monument at Raheendhu, and at some point between that 1940 description and the present day, the site ceased to be findable. It has not been relocated by subsequent survey. The record was compiled by Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy, with a revised upload noted as recently as July 2018, suggesting the absence is confirmed rather than merely unexamined.
Ballinascorney Upper sits in the Dublin Mountains, accessible via the Ballinascorney Gap road that runs south-west from Tallaght into the foothills. The terrain is open upland, a mix of rough grazing and bog, and the Raheendhu monument referenced in the record provides the nearest fixed point for orientation. Anyone with a serious interest in tracking down the site would be working from Price's 1940 coordinates and a good deal of patience; there is no marked trail, no signage, and no guarantee that the stones are still visible above ground level or remain in anything like their recorded position. The value of the place now is as much archival as physical, a reminder that the archaeological record of a landscape is always incomplete, and that what gets written down in one generation does not always survive to be verified in the next.