Rock art, Gortacloghane, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Gortacloghane, Co. Kerry

On a fractured boulder in rough pasture on the south-eastern spur of the Mullaghanattin mountain range in County Kerry, someone in prehistory took considerable trouble to carve symbols into a west-facing surface of stone.

The boulder, which sits at roughly 154 metres above sea level and looks out over the Blackwater river valley, has been pressed into later, more mundane service as the western anchor of a low earth-and-stone field boundary. Yet the decoration on its upper face long predates any such agricultural arrangement.

The carved surface carries a classic cup-and-ring motif, the kind of abstract prehistoric rock art found scattered across Atlantic Europe and Ireland, in which a shallow circular depression, the cup, is surrounded by one or more incised rings. Here the overall motif measures around 18 centimetres across, with the central cup reaching a diameter of 6 centimetres. Beside it, towards the western side of the decorated panel, sit three further cupmarks, simple unringed depressions that may have held independent symbolic meaning or may have formed part of a wider composition now difficult to read in full. Two additional possible cupmarks appear elsewhere on the surface, one centrally placed and one partly obscured by moss towards the south. The boulder is not an isolated curiosity. A kerb circle, a standing stone, and a stone row are recorded close by to the east, suggesting that this stretch of ground once formed a deliberately structured ritual or ceremonial landscape, the full logic of which is no longer recoverable.

The site sits in working pasture on a hillside that slopes generally southward, with the decorated boulder on a relatively level patch of the otherwise angled ground. The cup-and-ring motif is described as clearly visible at the highest point of the carved surface, which is a practical advantage given how easily low-relief rock art can disappear into the texture of weathered stone, particularly under flat or overcast light. Angled morning or evening light tends to throw such shallow carvings into sharper relief.

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