Rock art, Caherlehillan, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Caherlehillan, Co. Kerry

On a west-facing slope of mountain heath above the River Ferta valley in County Kerry, a weathered sandstone boulder carries two small circular depressions that are easy to mistake for the work of nature rather than of human hands.

These are cupmarks, shallow bowl-shaped hollows ground or pecked into rock surfaces, and they represent one of the most ancient and least understood forms of prehistoric art found across Ireland. What makes this particular boulder quietly puzzling is precisely that ambiguity: the stone itself is naturally dimpled and fractured, and only a relatively small sub-rectangular patch of its surface, roughly a metre by twenty centimetres, bears the marks that distinguish it as a made thing rather than a geological accident.

The two cupmarks sit about 89 centimetres apart. The one in the north-east corner measures approximately 7 centimetres across and 15 millimetres deep; the one near the centre of the decorated surface is marginally smaller at 6 centimetres in diameter but the same depth. Both are heavily weathered, and the south-eastern half of the stone is largely obscured by lichen, which makes reading the surface more difficult still. The boulder itself is substantial, running over three metres north to south and sitting nearly a metre high at its western edge. A small natural ledge on the north side functions as a kind of step up onto the stone. The site was identified as a rock art monument by A. Lambe in 2014, a relatively recent recognition for markings that are likely prehistoric in origin, though the exact period, as is common with Irish rock art, remains uncertain.

The boulder sits at 164 metres above sea level, with open views across the River Ferta valley to the south-west, and a field boundary running roughly north-east to south-west about four and a half metres to the west. The landscape here is upland heath, which means the approach is uneven and the stone sits in the kind of exposed, quietly remote terrain that characterises much of the Kerry uplands. The lichen cover on the upper surface means the decorated area is best observed on the lower north-western face, where the aspect is steep and the motifs, faint as they are, remain most legible.

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