Rock art, Kealduff, Co. Kerry

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Rock art, Kealduff, Co. Kerry

On a slope of rocky mountain heath in County Kerry, at around 192 metres above sea level, a sandstone boulder carries a set of marks that have endured long enough for their original meaning to be entirely lost.

The boulder itself is modest, roughly 1.25 metres in its longest dimension and half a metre high at its tallest edge, but its surface has been worked with a deliberateness that is hard to ignore once you know to look. This is prehistoric rock art, a broad category covering carved or pecked motifs left on exposed rock surfaces across Ireland and Britain during the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods, most of them resisting any confident interpretation even now.

The decorated face of the boulder is oriented towards the ESE and carries an arrangement of intersecting linear grooves. The dominant feature is a groove nearly 47 centimetres long, running roughly east to west across the southern side of the surface, with two shorter grooves branching from it, one curving gently southward over 19 centimetres, and another extending just 3 centimetres to the north-northeast. At the northwest edge of the same surface, a curvilinear run of pickmarks, about 11 centimetres long, adds a second technique to the composition. Whether these grooves were incised in a single episode or accumulated over time is unknown. What is clear is that the site does not stand alone: another rock art site lies approximately 23 metres to the south-southeast, suggesting this part of the Behy river valley was a place people returned to, and marked, more than once. The views from the boulder reach across that valley toward the Seefin and Droum Mountains, which may or may not have been relevant to whoever made the carvings.

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