Rock art, Gortbrack, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
In the low blanket bog of the Blackwater River valley in County Kerry, a large sandstone boulder sits at the base of a south-facing slope, its surface carved with marks that nobody noticed until 2018.
The boulder is substantial, roughly three metres in length and close to a metre high, but what makes it unusual is a convex, north-west-facing panel of decorated stone that carries at least seven distinct motifs, along with hints of others too worn to read clearly. It is the kind of site that rewards patience and a low sun.
The carvings belong to a tradition of prehistoric rock art found widely across Ireland and Atlantic Europe, typically consisting of cupmarks, rings, and grooves whose precise meaning remains unresolved. Cupmarks are shallow, roughly circular depressions pecked into stone, and at Gortbrack they appear in an intriguing variation: a triangular cluster of three inverted cupmarks, egg-shaped in outline and each defined by a deeply incised circular margin, positioned off-centre on the decorated surface. Two of these are well preserved; a third has been damaged, probably by repeated cycles of freezing and thawing. Researchers have noted that these inverted forms may have been deliberately carved to echo two natural erosion hollows lower on the same boulder face, suggesting whoever made them was in conversation with the stone itself rather than simply working on a blank surface. Elsewhere on the panel, a meandering groove nearly a metre long originates from a penannular ring, an incomplete circle open at one end, and winds diagonally across the stone before terminating at a glacial striation, a scratch left by moving ice during the last glaciation. Whether that termination point was intentional or coincidental is an open question. Additional features include a radial groove, a conventional cupmark, two semi-circular grooves at the north-east end of the panel, and a second faint meandering groove with four small pock marks near its southern end. The site was discovered in 2018 by Paul Phelan of the KerryLIFE Project, making it among the more recently recorded examples of Kerry rock art. Forestry now obscures what would once have been open views of the surrounding mountains, a reminder that the landscape around the boulder has changed considerably since the carvings were made.