Rock art, Doire Fhionáin Beag, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the eastern edge of a field clearance cairn in Doire Fhionáin Beag, a large boulder sits partially swallowed by earth at its northwestern end.
Its upper surface carries something easy to miss: six small, roughly shaped hollows, known as cupmarks, clustered at the northeast end of the stone. Three are arranged in a row, three more curve into an arc beside them. The boulder is not monumental in scale, measuring roughly three metres in length and no more than a metre high, but the marks on it place it within a tradition of prehistoric rock art found across Atlantic Europe, the purpose of which remains genuinely unresolved.
Cupmarks are among the oldest and most widespread forms of prehistoric carving, made by pecking or grinding circular depressions into stone surfaces. They appear on boulders, outcrops, and megalithic structures from Ireland to Scandinavia, and while their meaning is debated, their deliberate placement is not. The six cupmarks here vary slightly in diameter, ranging from three to six centimetres across, and are shallow, the deepest just one centimetre. Their grouping, a geometric row alongside a loose arc, suggests intention rather than accident, though what that intention was is beyond recovery. The site sits at around 100 metres above sea level on ground that slopes upward to the north, and from the boulder there are open views southward towards the Beara Peninsula. It was identified as rock art by Aoibheann Lambe in 2018, meaning it entered the record relatively recently, and may have gone unremarked for a very long time before that.
The boulder lies approximately 35 metres east of the N70 road, at the edge of a field clearance cairn, which is a mound formed when farmers gathered stones from the surrounding land, a commonplace feature of the Irish landscape that can sometimes obscure or adjoin older material. The cupmarks are on the upper surface of the stone, so they are best viewed by looking down at the northeast end, where the clustering of marks is most apparent.