Rock art, Canearagh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Canearagh, Co. Kerry

On a gently sloping pasture field above 186 metres in the Kerry uplands, a flat rock surface carries marks that were made by hands working stone against stone sometime in prehistoric antiquity.

The carvings are small, easily missed, and entirely without obvious explanation, which is more or less the condition in which prehistoric rock art has always met the modern eye.

The decorated surface at Canearagh holds two cup-and-ring motifs, a form found widely across Atlantic Europe and Ireland, in which a shallow central hollow, the cup, is surrounded by one or more concentric carved rings. Cup-and-ring carving is understood to date broadly to the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, though its purpose remains genuinely unresolved. The larger of the two motifs here measures around 26 centimetres across, with rings roughly one and a half centimetres wide and a central cup five centimetres in diameter. A second, partial motif sits about 56 centimetres to the southwest, smaller and complete only through its southern and western arc, the northern portion now cut off by a stone field boundary that was built across it at some unknown later date. Alongside these two ring motifs, the surface carries thirteen individual cupmarks, plain shallow depressions with no encircling rings, ranging from one and a half to three centimetres across. Scattered pickmarks across the southern and eastern portions of the surface suggest either further, incomplete work or markings of a different intention. A natural fracture in the rock runs east to west from one of the cupmarks, a reminder that the people who made these carvings were working with and around the existing character of the stone rather than on a blank slate.

The outcrop faces northwest at 186 metres above sea level, and the views from the site run southwest to northwest toward Teeromoyle Mountain and Drung Hill. Whether that orientation had any meaning to whoever carved the surface is unknown, but it is worth noting that many Irish rock art sites do occupy elevated ground with long sightlines, and this one is no exception.

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