Rock art, Derrynablaha, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a south-east facing slope in Derrynablaha, on the Iveragh Peninsula in Co. Kerry, a prehistoric carved stone has been quietly serving as a doorstep.
It lies flat in a gap in a drystone wall, a threshold stone for a small gateway leading to a group of outhouses, its upper surface now greened over with algae. The carvings it carries, worked into the rock perhaps thousands of years before anyone thought to build a wall around them, are easy to miss. The motifs are subtle: two cupmarks, small shallow depressions pecked into the stone's surface, and a cup-and-ring, a cupmark surrounded by a faint enclosing circle, a form found across Atlantic Europe and Ireland from the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods. One of the plain cupmarks also retains slight traces of a surrounding ring. The decorated surface measures roughly 28 by 26 centimetres, and the motifs are clustered towards the north side of the stone.
The stone itself is sub-rectangular, smooth and unfractured, measuring around 44 by 38 centimetres. Its current setting, a defined gap in a drystone wall standing 1.4 metres high, sits at the top of an old laneway that once connected an abandoned settlement to the west with a now-derelict two-storey farmhouse to the east-south-east. Exactly when the carved stone was lifted from its original context and pressed into service as a threshold is unknown, but it is a fate that has befallen prehistoric rock art across Ireland, where worked stones were frequently reused in field walls, building foundations, and farm structures as the land was cleared and organised over centuries. The site was recorded by Anati in 1963 and again by Finlay in 1973, who also noted the subtlety of the markings, and it was later included in O'Sullivan and Sheehan's 1996 archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula.