Rock art, Caherdaniel, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Caherdaniel, Co. Kerry

A sandstone boulder pressed into a drystone field boundary near Caherdaniel holds a set of carvings so small and shallow they are easy to miss entirely, especially beneath the whitethorn branches that now hang over them.

The decorated surface measures just fifty by twenty centimetres, and the marks themselves, cup-and-ring motifs typical of prehistoric rock art across Atlantic Europe, are only two to three millimetres deep. Cup-and-ring carvings consist of a small circular depression, the cup, surrounded by one or more concentric carved rings; their precise purpose remains unknown, though they appear repeatedly in upland and marginal landscapes throughout Ireland and Britain, generally attributed to the Bronze Age or earlier. Here, three such motifs cluster at the western end of the surface, one of them incomplete, its ring tracing an arc from south-west around to north-north-east before stopping short. A further possible cupmark sits adjacent, rough and uneven inside, and roughly a metre to the north-east lies a group of four shallower depressions whose regularity raises the question of whether they were carved at all or simply formed by the rock itself.

The boulder, a fractured sandstone roughly two metres by three and standing up to one and a half metres at its northern end, sits at about fifty-seven metres above sea level on a north-facing slope, mountains and high ground closing in on all sides. It was incorporated long ago into the field boundary that now runs between a pasture to the west and a dwelling house to the east, which is how a great deal of Irish prehistoric rock art survives, absorbed into later agricultural landscapes and noticed, if at all, only by chance. This particular site was first identified as rock art by A. Lambe in 2016, a relatively recent recognition for something that may have been carved thousands of years ago. Resting on the same rock surface is a separate, loose boulder bearing four drill holes, almost certainly made to take dynamite charges during land clearance at some point in the post-medieval period, a reminder that this landscape has been worked and reworked across many centuries.

The motifs are genuinely difficult to see. Overhanging vegetation obscures the surface, and the carvings themselves are subtle even in good raking light, which is the condition that tends to throw shallow rock art into relief most effectively. The four shallower marks to the north-east remain ambiguous; recorded as possible cupmarks, they may yet prove to be nothing more than natural dimpling in the stone.

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