Rock art, Cloghera More, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Cloghera More, Co. Kerry

On the north-facing lower slopes of Mullaghanattin, a mountain in south-west Kerry, a low boulder sits in rough pasture on a mantle of bog, its upper surface covered almost entirely in prehistoric carvings.

What makes it quietly extraordinary is the sheer density of the work: approximately thirty-two motifs pressed into a roughly square surface barely two metres across, the stone so thoroughly marked that very little of it was left untouched by whoever carved it, probably during the Bronze Age.

The dominant forms are cup-and-ring motifs, a type of prehistoric rock art found across Atlantic Europe and consisting of a small, shallow depression, the cup, surrounded by one or more incised concentric circles. Here the vocabulary extends beyond the usual: there are cup-and-two-ring motifs across much of the surface, a rarer cup-and-three-ring motif near the northern end, a single cupmark paired with a radial groove running outward from it, and a large oval enclosure in the southern area that contains its own cup-and-ring within. The rings themselves vary between annular, forming complete circles, and penannular, where the circle is left deliberately open at one point. Two small raised platform areas near the centre of the stone appear to have been shaped by hand, each carrying its own cup-and-ring. Natural fractures cut across several motifs, and the stone's surface drops slightly from south-west to north-east, giving it a subtle step. At 203 metres above sea level, it overlooks the Owenroe river valley to the north, with Mullaghanattin rising to the south-east. An earlier record of the stone counted twenty-four motifs; closer survey by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly revised that figure upward to around thirty-two, suggesting that earlier inspection had missed carvings obscured by weathering or the stone's rough, fractured texture.

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