Rock art, Derreeny, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Derreeny, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing slope above the Kealduff River valley in Kerry, a fractured sandstone outcrop carries markings that nobody made recently.

The carvings are prehistoric rock art, a category of monument found widely across Atlantic Europe but still poorly understood in terms of precise meaning or purpose. What makes this particular outcrop quietly compelling is how deliberate its decoration appears despite its modest scale: the surface is sub-oval, roughly 1.8 metres by 1.33 metres, and within that space a prehistoric hand, or several hands across an uncertain span of time, left a precise and varied vocabulary of marks.

The decoration consists of several circular concentrations of pickmarks, each around 8 centimetres in diameter, along with a series of grooves worked into the stone with some care. Pickmarking is exactly what it sounds like: repeated, controlled strikes against the rock face to produce a pitted surface, a technique used across Ireland and Britain during the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods. Two of the circular pickmark clusters sit slightly off-centre to the north and are described as particularly clear and visible. In the south-western corner of the surface there is a pair of curvilinear grooves, one 17 centimetres long, the other 18 centimetres, running close together. A third curvilinear groove sits further to the east, and a short linear groove occupies the northern sector. Numerous additional pickmarks cluster around these grooves, suggesting the surface was returned to and worked at more than once, or that the grooves and the clusters were conceived together as a single composition.

The outcrop sits at 117 metres above sea level in rough mountain pasture, with a tributary stream running about two metres to the west. The decorated face has a steep north-west-facing aspect, which means it catches indirect light for much of the day. Visiting in low-angle morning or evening light, or on overcast days when shadows are soft, is generally the most reliable way to read carved rock surfaces of this kind, as raking light catches the shallow relief of pickmarks and grooves that can otherwise appear almost invisible.

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