Rock art, Derrynablaha, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Derrynablaha, Co. Kerry

On a steep, north-easterly slope in the upland heath of Derrynablaha, at around 146 metres above sea level, a rough sandstone outcrop carries marks that nobody alive made.

The flat decorated surface is relatively modest in area, roughly 2.2 metres by 0.7 metres, sitting at a lower level than the outcrop's eastern face, which rises to about 2.5 metres. Into that surface, prehistoric hands pecked approximately thirty-one cupmarks, the small circular hollows, typically a few centimetres across and less than a centimetre deep, that are the most common motif in Irish Bronze Age rock art. Several of those cupmarks are grouped into a loose circular arrangement around a central one. There are also cup-and-ring motifs, where a carved ring encircles a central cup, a form found widely across Atlantic Europe, and a partial cup-and-ring off-centre to the north-west. Grass has colonised the natural crevasses of the stone, and some of the pitting across the surface may owe as much to weathering as to deliberate carving, which makes distinguishing intent from erosion a genuinely difficult problem.

The site was recorded and described by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their 1996 archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, drawing in part on earlier work by Finlay from 1973. What the carvings meant to the people who made them remains, as with most Irish rock art, opaque. The outcrop itself is sandstone, rough and fractured, cut into the hillside on its south-western side. The decorated face is comparatively flat within an otherwise irregular, angular rock form, which may well be why it was chosen. Random pickmarks are concentrated around the central cluster of cupmarks, suggesting either repeated activity or a site that accumulated meaning over time.

The setting repays attention in its own right. The slope looks out north-eastward over the Kealduff River valley and Lough Brin, while to the west the terrain rises steeply into rugged mountain country. The motifs themselves are quite faint, and raking light, particularly in low morning or evening sun, is generally the most reliable way to read shallow rock carvings of this kind. The crevasses and step-up along the north-east side of the outcrop give the rock a layered, almost architectural quality, though the carved surface itself is easy to miss without knowing where to look.

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