Rock art, Derrygarrane, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the upper southern slopes of Knocklomena mountain in County Kerry, a large flat stone lies in the bog with its decorated upper surface facing the sky.
The carvings are modest by any objective measure, a single ring and a cup-and-three-rings motif, but that restraint is part of what makes prehistoric rock art so quietly unsettling. Cup-and-ring marks, the collective term for these shallow carved depressions and their surrounding concentric circles, appear across Atlantic Europe during the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods, yet no consensus has emerged about what they meant to the people who made them. The stone itself measures roughly 1.95 metres by 0.9 metres, large enough to suggest deliberate placement or at least deliberate choice, and from where it sits at approximately 255 metres above sea level, it commands a wide view southward over Kenmare Bay to the Beara Peninsula.
The site was documented by archaeologists Aidan O'Sullivan and Jerry Sheehan as part of their comprehensive survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press in 1996, a volume that brought systematic attention to a landscape rich in prehistoric and early medieval remains. The stone sits west of a stream that flows south from Lough Fadda, a locational detail that sounds precise but has proved elusive in practice. Later fieldwork described the surrounding terrain as an area of mountain heath scattered with boulders at 255 metres ordnance datum, and noted frankly that the stone could not be relocated. That single word, "not located", carries a particular weight. It means the carving is out there, documented once, now absorbed back into a boulder-strewn hillside that offers no obvious way of distinguishing one moss-covered rock from another.
Anyone drawn to walk Knocklomena in search of it should know that the mountain heath on these south-facing slopes is rough going, and the bog makes footing uncertain. The stream running south from Lough Fadda offers the most reliable navigational reference point given in the sources, but even with that, the stone has defeated at least one subsequent search. The views across to the Beara Peninsula are real and verifiable regardless.