Rock art, Derrynablaha, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Derrynablaha, Co. Kerry

On a south-east-facing slope in Derrynablaha, a large boulder once carried one of the more intricate examples of prehistoric rock art recorded on the Iveragh Peninsula.

The stone, measuring roughly 2.25 metres by 0.85 metres and at least a metre thick, had a stepped upper surface, with its carvings concentrated on the lower southern plane. That carved face was itself divided by a natural fissure and a curving groove running roughly east to west, creating two distinct zones of decoration. To the south of this division, the surface held ten simple cupmarks, two incomplete cup-and-rings, a cup-and-ring with a curved radial groove, and a linear groove. To the north were six more cupmarks, five cup-and-rings, a plain ring, and a more elaborate motif: a cup enclosed by two gapped rings, with a radial groove ending in an external cupmark. Cupmarks are shallow, roughly circular depressions pecked into the rock surface; cup-and-ring marks surround these depressions with one or more concentric carved rings. Both forms appear widely across Atlantic Europe during the Neolithic and Bronze Age, though their purpose remains genuinely unresolved.

The site was documented by Finlay in 1973 and later included in the comprehensive archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, published by Cork University Press in 1996. That survey catalogued the boulder as entry 308, accompanied by a drawn record of the carvings. At some point after that documentation, a field boundary running north-west to south-east was removed in this area of improved pasture, and it is considered possible that the boulder was disturbed or displaced in the process. No surface trace of the stone is now visible, and no comparable rock has been identified nearby. The only remaining evidence of the boundary itself is a line of scorched, pale grass cutting across the darker surrounding field, a faint agricultural ghost marking the place where something older may have been lost.

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