Rock art, Fananierin, Co. Wicklow

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Fananierin, Co. Wicklow

A flat slab of schist lying barely a finger's width above the grass at Fananierin in County Wicklow holds one of those quietly perplexing survivals from prehistory: a scattering of cup marks, small circular depressions ground deliberately into the stone's surface by people whose intentions remain entirely opaque.

Cup marks are among the most common forms of prehistoric rock art found across Ireland and Britain, yet they are also among the least understood, their purpose debated for well over a century without resolution. What makes this particular stone worth pausing over is less the grandeur of its setting than the intimacy of the marks themselves, and the fact that something so unassuming has endured at all.

The slab is roughly rectangular, measuring 1.65 metres from north to south and 90 centimetres across, and it sits so flush with the surrounding ground that it could easily be missed underfoot. It was first formally noted by Price in 1937, placing its entry into the scholarly record in the early decades when systematic attention to Irish rock art was still relatively new. Across the surface there are approximately 17 cup marks in total, most of them clustered towards the middle of the stone. The majority range between four and five centimetres in diameter and around one and a half to two centimetres deep, though several smaller examples measure only two to three centimetres across. Four of the marks on the eastern side of the slab break from the general scatter and fall into a distinct linear arrangement, a detail that invites speculation without quite justifying any firm conclusion. Whether that alignment was intentional or incidental is, like so much else about cup-marked stones, unanswerable from the evidence that survives. The Wicklow Rock Art Project, based at the School of Archaeology at University College Dublin under the direction of Dr. Clíodhna Ní Lionáin, has produced a photogrammetric three-dimensional model of the stone, a technique that uses overlapping photographs to render surface topography with considerable precision, making the cup marks legible in a way that flat photography rarely achieves.

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