Rock art, Derreeny, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Derreeny, Co. Kerry

On the lower slopes of Knockaunanattin Mountain in south-west Kerry, a sandstone outcrop sits within a landscape of rough hill pasture, incorporated into an old field system and part-absorbed by a drystone field wall.

Carved across its surface are motifs that nobody has yet fully explained: shallow circular depressions known as cupmarks, each only a few centimetres across, surrounded in many cases by one or more concentric rings incised into the stone. The largest of these cup-and-ring motifs measures around 24 centimetres in diameter. Prehistoric rock art of this kind is found widely across Atlantic Europe, but its purpose remains genuinely unknown, which gives sites like this an odd, unresolved quality that more legible monuments tend to lack.

The decorated surface faces south-south-east, looking out over the valley of the Kealduff River, and the motifs are concentrated toward the eastern side of the stone, where they are divided by a vertical groove running roughly a metre down the face. To the east of that groove there are cupmarks and eleven cup-and-ring motifs; to the west, further cupmarks, seven more cup-and-ring motifs, and one cup-and-three-rings, the most elaborate of the group. A scatter of pickmarks, the small individual pecked indentations left by the carving process, appears at the western end and to the north-east. A second carved boulder sits approximately 18 metres to the north, and a further rock art site lies around 80 metres to the east, which suggests that this part of the mountain was not chosen casually. The area around both outcrops is strewn with earthfast boulders and loose rocks of varying sizes, so the decorated stones do not announce themselves obviously against their surroundings.

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