Rock art, Glebe, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Glebe, Co. Kerry

On a south-west-facing slope of mountain heath above the Carhar River valley in County Kerry, a large sub-oval flagstone sits against a drystone field wall at roughly 155 metres above sea level.

What makes it worth pausing over is a matter of subtlety: two parallel grooves, each around thirteen to fourteen centimetres wide and three centimetres deep, run across its surface in a wavy, undulating pattern, and a single cupmark, just five centimetres in diameter and four millimetres deep, sits quietly at the stone's south-eastern edge. Cupmarks are among the most common motifs in prehistoric rock art, small circular depressions pecked into stone whose purpose remains genuinely uncertain, though they appear across Atlantic Europe from the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods onward. The grooves here are less typical, and where natural fissures and striations already cross the stone's weathered face, the question of where geology ends and human intention begins is not always easy to answer.

The flagstone itself is substantial, measuring two metres along its north-east to south-west axis and just over 1.8 metres across, with a maximum thickness of around 35 centimetres. It rests on the southern side of a drystone field wall, sitting about a metre above the ground on its south-east side and slightly lower on the south-west, so the decorated surface faces west, catching whatever light comes in from the direction of Cahersiveen and the valley below. The deep weathering across the stone suggests considerable age, and the decorated area, concentrated into a roughly ten-centimetre square, is modest relative to the stone's overall size, which perhaps explains why it might be passed over without a second look by anyone not already searching for it.

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Pete F
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