They are easy to miss, easy to dismiss, and almost certainly prehistoric. This is what Irish rock art often looks like in the field: not the grand spirals of Newgrange, but modest marks on modest stones, sitting quietly in the landscape while the centuries accumulate around them.

The outcrop itself is small, roughly 89 centimetres east to west and 74 centimetres north to south, rising no more than 29 centimetres at its highest point. The decorated surface is a roughly triangular area measuring about 23 by 10 centimetres, and it is level enough that the motifs, known as cupmarks, sit clearly on the face. Cupmarks are exactly what the name suggests: shallow, rounded depressions ground or pecked into rock, among the most common and most enigmatic forms of prehistoric rock art found across Ireland and Britain. Their purpose remains genuinely unknown. The three examples here vary slightly in size, the largest around six centimetres in diameter and ten millimetres deep, the smallest just three centimetres across and three millimetres deep, spaced a few centimetres apart. All three are heavily weathered and partly obscured by lichen; the westernmost may also be partly buried under encroaching sod. The site was identified as a rock art monument by A. Lambe in 2014, which means it sat unrecorded for however many thousands of years it had been in that field.

The outcrop lies on a south-west-facing slope, and from that position there is a clear view down the River Ferta valley towards Valentia Harbour. Whether or not that orientation was deliberate, it is a reminder that prehistoric people who made these marks were choosing specific places in specific landscapes, not simply carving on the nearest available stone. A roofless stone shed stands about 30 metres to the south-west, a later layer in what is a long-occupied corner of the Iveragh Peninsula. The cupmarks themselves reward close attention at ground level, particularly in low raking light, which tends to bring shallow carved surfaces into relief in ways that flat overhead light will not.