Rock art, Ballykissane, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
A flat boulder propped on a single stone beneath a whitethorn tree, sitting inside a children's burial ground on a quiet rise in County Kerry, is not where most people expect to encounter prehistoric art.
Yet that is exactly the setting at Kilbrack Burial Ground near Ballykissane, where a decorated stone bearing sixteen carved motifs has been sitting, possibly displaced from its original location, for an unknown stretch of time.
The boulder itself is relatively modest in scale, measuring just over a metre in its longest dimension and no more than 22 centimetres thick, but its upper surface is densely worked. Cup-and-ring marks, the most common form of prehistoric rock art found across Atlantic Europe and dating broadly to the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods, are carved across most of the surface. A cup-and-ring motif consists of a shallow circular depression, the cup, surrounded by one or more incised concentric rings. The largest example here measures 18 centimetres in overall diameter, with the central cup reaching 8 centimetres across and carved to a depth of 20 millimetres. Two further cup-and-ring motifs sit adjacent to it toward the southwest, and a composite element combining a cup-and-ring with a nearby cupmark enclosed by a partial ring adds a slightly more complex arrangement to that end of the stone. Twelve individual cupmarks, plain circular depressions without surrounding rings and ranging from 5 to 9 centimetres in diameter, are scattered across the remaining surface. All sixteen elements are recorded as being in good condition. The boulder is described as possibly ex-situ, meaning it may have been moved at some point from wherever it originally stood, which makes the question of its intended landscape context difficult to answer with any certainty.
The burial ground in which the stone now sits is known as Kilbrack, a cillin or children's burial ground, a type of unconsecrated site used historically in Ireland for the interment of unbaptised infants and others excluded from Church burial. The setting is quietly layered: prehistoric carving, post-medieval burial practice, and the whitethorn tree under which the stone rests, all on a low rise with a glimpse of Castlemaine Harbour to the north and the long ridge of the Slieve Mish mountains of the Dingle Peninsula visible to the west.