Rock art, Kealduff, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Kealduff, Co. Kerry

On a boulder-scattered slope above the River Behy valley in south Kerry, a slab of rock carries a small but intricate set of prehistoric carvings, most of it swallowed by peat.

Only the southern portion of the outcrop breaks free of the bog, offering a relatively smooth surface roughly 1.6 metres by 2 metres on which the markings are visible. It is, in one sense, a fragment of something much larger, and the larger part may never be fully seen.

The exposed section holds a vocabulary of motifs familiar from prehistoric rock art across Atlantic Europe: cup-and-ring marks, which are exactly what they sound like, small circular depressions hammered into the rock surface and surrounded by one or more incised rings, and plain cupmarks, which are the depressions without the rings. At Kealduff, two of the cup-and-ring marks carry radial grooves cutting outward from the cup through the rings, and one has an additional groove that curves away from the outer ring and ends in a separate cupmark, as though the carver was linking one motif to another across the stone. A third cupmark sits within a grooved arc rather than complete rings. What sets this surface apart from more straightforward examples is a long, meandering groove that wanders across the rock before terminating in an oval pocked area, itself surrounded by further grooves and patches of pocking. The effect is less formal, more restless, than the concentric geometry of the cup-and-ring marks nearby.

The site sits at around 151 metres above sea level on a northeast-facing slope of well-grazed mountain heath, with open views down toward the River Behy valley. It has been formally recorded but not reliably located in the field, and there is some possibility that it has been assigned a duplicate reference corresponding to another recorded point roughly 25 metres to the north. The peat that covers most of the outcrop makes confident identification difficult, and the decorated surface that does remain exposed is easy to miss against the general scatter of rock and boulder on the surrounding heath.

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