Rock art, Ballygamboon, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Ballygamboon, Co. Kerry

In a pasture on a south-west-facing slope in Ballygamboon, County Kerry, there is a stone with ring markings carved into it.

The trouble is that nobody can currently find it. The carvings sit within the interior of a ringfort, one of those circular enclosures, defined by earthen banks and ditches, that were used as farmsteads or defended homesteads throughout early medieval Ireland. Rock art of this kind, typically comprising concentric rings, cup marks, and other abstract motifs pecked into stone surfaces, is found across Ireland and Britain and is generally attributed to the Bronze Age. At Ballygamboon, the decorated boulder appears to have been absorbed quietly back into the earth, with no visible surface trace remaining.

The most recent documentation of the carving comes not from any direct observation but from an ITA Survey carried out in 1942, which briefly described the ringfort and noted that a large stone bearing ring markings lay at its centre. When the site was examined more recently, only a relatively small earthfast boulder in the bank at the south-east could be identified, and even that showed no obvious rock art. The working assumption is that the carved stone has gradually sunk into the ground and become obscured beneath a layer of earthen and organic debris. The interior of the ringfort is frequently colonised by wild iris, which suggests the kind of damp, undisturbed ground conditions that would accelerate exactly that sort of burial over the decades since 1942.

The site sits at roughly thirty metres above sea level, within what is now pasture land. A visitor walking the area today would find the ringfort earthworks still present, but the carved stone itself remains elusive, somewhere beneath the surface, its ring markings intact in all likelihood, simply waiting out the years underground.

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Pete F
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