Rock art, Derrynablaha, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Derrynablaha, Co. Kerry

On an east-facing slope above the Kealduff River valley in Kerry, a low sandstone outcrop sits in mountain pasture at around 190 metres above sea level, looking out towards Lough Brin and the surrounding peaks.

It would be easy to walk past entirely. The decorated surface measures less than a metre across in either direction, and much of what was carved into it thousands of years ago is now partly obscured by black moss and softened by long centuries of weathering. What survives is genuinely subtle: not the kind of monument that announces itself.

The rock art here belongs to a tradition of prehistoric carving found widely across Atlantic Europe, typically associated with the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods, though precise dating remains difficult. The carvings consist of precisely made pickmarks, each roughly 4 to 5 millimetres in diameter and 2 to 3 millimetres deep, concentrated on the north-eastern half of the decorated face. At the northern end, these marks form a distinct circular arrangement about 10 centimetres across, which may surround a cupmark, though weathering makes that reading inconclusive. A cupmark is simply a shallow, rounded hollow pecked into stone, one of the most common motifs in prehistoric rock art. Towards the southern end of the surface, a semi-circular formation of pickmarks echoes the fuller ring above it. Most significantly, there is a cup-and-ring motif, the oval cupmark measuring roughly 3 centimetres at its widest, encircled by a ring just a centimetre wide, the whole composition about 7 centimetres across. A natural fracture in the rock runs close to its eastern edge, and whoever made this carving worked around it, or perhaps with it in mind.

The site sits a couple of metres south of a drystone field boundary, with a stream running about 20 metres further downslope. The higher ground to the south, west, and north-west closes in around it, while the view opens eastward across the valley. That orientation, the decorated face angled towards the south-south-west, the landscape framed in one particular direction, may or may not be coincidental. Raking light in the early morning, when the sun catches the stone at a low angle, tends to reveal carved surfaces that are otherwise nearly invisible to the eye.

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