Rock art, Kealduff, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
A sheep path runs between two inscribed rock panels in the boggy terrain at Kealduff in County Kerry, the animals apparently indifferent to what lies on either side of them.
The two panels sit just 1.6 metres apart, and both carry carvings that are thousands of years old, quietly weathering into the ground beneath vegetation and standing water.
The larger of the two panels, measuring roughly 2.2 metres east to west and 1.2 metres north to south at its western end, lies flush with the ground in wet, boggy terrain and is partly overlain by vegetation to the north and east, with waterlogging to the south. Despite the conditions, the inscriptions remain distinct enough for individual pockmarks to be identified. Cup-and-ring marks are the most characteristic form of prehistoric rock art found across Atlantic Europe, consisting of a small circular hollow, the cup, surrounded by one or more incised rings. Here, the western end of the larger panel carries an irregularly shaped example with a cupmark of about 3 centimetres in diameter and a ring of roughly 12 centimetres. Elsewhere on the same surface, three solidly pocked rectangles, each approximately 4 centimetres by 2.5 centimetres, appear above and below the cup-and-ring. Further along the upper part of the panel, a more complex cup-and-two-rings motif, with an outer ring of around 34 centimetres, occupies a fractured section of rock where the outer ring may be conjoined with a roughly square-shaped ring, an unusual variation on the typical concentric form. The inner ring encloses one clearly defined cupmark alongside three more heavily weathered possible examples. The second panel, a low-lying stone measuring roughly one metre by 0.8 metres with a near-level upper surface of about 0.6 metres square, carries a finely pocked sub-rectangular ring enclosing a cupmark with a radial line set between two grooves, the geometry of it precise and deliberate despite the small scale. Above that, lichen partially obscures what appear to be two sub-circular partial rings and further grooves, faint enough that the full extent of the carving may never be recoverable.