Rock art, Derreeny, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
A large sandstone boulder on a south-facing slope above the Kealduff River valley carries a vocabulary of marks that nobody has fully deciphered in the millennia since they were made.
The rock, roughly 3.4 metres by 2.6 metres, sits at 172 metres above sea level in upland heath pasture on the Iveragh Peninsula, incorporated into a field boundary as though it were simply convenient building material. Its decorated surface faces south and measures about 2.2 metres across, and what is visible there already tells a complicated story. Cupmarks, the shallow, roughly circular depressions that form the most basic unit of prehistoric rock art, appear across the surface in clusters and sequences. Some are linked by grooves; others are enclosed within partial rings or curvilinear frames. One groove runs nearly 90 centimetres in a near-straight line and terminates in a cupmark at its northern end. An L-shaped groove sits adjacent to it. The relationship between these elements, whether sequential, contemporary, or accumulated over generations, is unknown.
When Finlay recorded the stone in 1973, seventeen cupmarks were counted along with a cup-and-three-rings motif, the latter being a cupmark surrounded by three concentric carved rings, a relatively elaborate form. A more recent survey by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly identified only thirteen cupmarks on the visible surface, and the cup-and-three-rings was not seen at all. The discrepancy is not necessarily a mystery of the marks themselves. Heavy sod covers the southwest side of the stone, furze has encroached from the southeast, and a layer of peat sits over a portion of the southern surface. Any of these could be concealing motifs that were visible decades ago, or motifs that have never been recorded. The decorated surface itself lies to the north of a natural fracture running east to west across the rock, as though whoever made the marks recognised and worked within the logic of the stone's own geometry.
The boulder looks out across the Kealduff River valley to the south and towards Ballaghbeama Gap to the northwest. That orientation is not unusual for rock art on the Iveragh Peninsula, where decorated surfaces frequently command long views across valley systems. Whether the placement was deliberate, chosen for what could be seen from the stone or what could be seen of it, is one of those questions that the marks themselves decline to answer.