Rock art, Derrynablaha, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Derrynablaha, Co. Kerry

On a boulder-scattered hillside above the Kealduff River valley in County Kerry, a sandstone outcrop carries marks that were almost certainly made by human hands in prehistory, though one of them remains stubbornly difficult to explain.

The rock sits at 181 metres above sea level on a steep north-east-facing slope, one of the largest stones in a scatter that spreads away to the south-west. It faces south-east, which means the decorated surface catches the morning light, and the valley below, Lough Brin, and a wide arc of Kerry mountains are all visible from the spot.

The carved surface is trapezoidal in shape, roughly ninety centimetres by eighty, and carries two distinct kinds of marking. The main concentration consists of finely worked pickmarks, each around six millimetres across and three millimetres deep, clustered across the lower-right portion of the face. Rock art of this kind, produced by repeatedly striking the stone surface with a harder implement, is a recurring feature of the Irish and broader Atlantic prehistoric landscape, though its precise meaning and dating remain debated. Alongside the pickmarks sits a small cupmark, a shallow circular depression about one and a half centimetres in diameter, at the upper edge of the concentration. Cupmarks are among the most common elements of prehistoric rock art in Ireland and Britain, and while their function is unknown, they appear on everything from open hillside outcrops to megalithic tomb stones. What sits at the very bottom of the face is harder to place: a star-shaped motif formed by three linear scores, each around twenty centimetres long, intersecting at a single central point. The geometry is precise enough to feel deliberate, but whether it belongs to the same period of activity as the cupmark and pickmarks, or represents a later and entirely separate hand, is an open question.

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