Rock art, Kealduff, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a fractured sandstone boulder in the mountain heath above the Behy River valley in County Kerry, somebody, at some point in prehistory, carved a series of concentric circles into the rock.
The carvings are small, weathered nearly to nothing, and face south-south-east on a triangular patch of stone no larger than a sheet of paper. That they survive at all, faint and pitted into the grainy surface, is quietly remarkable.
The boulder sits at around 170 metres above sea level on a north-east-facing slope, beside a stream, with long views down over the Behy River valley. It is sub-oval in plan, roughly 3.4 metres north to south and 1.8 metres east to west, and rises to about 0.7 metres at its northern end. The decorated surface holds three motifs: a cup-and-three-ring design, the largest of the group at roughly 18 by 22 centimetres, and two cup-and-ring motifs, one about 11 centimetres across and a slightly smaller one to the north-east. Cup-and-ring marks, the most common form of prehistoric rock art found across Atlantic Europe and beyond, consist of a shallow circular depression, the cup, surrounded by one or more incised concentric rings; their purpose remains genuinely unknown, though ritual, territorial, and astronomical explanations have all been proposed over the years. Here the rings are worn to depths of just two to four millimetres, and their widths are barely more than a centimetre, which gives some sense of how carefully a visitor would need to look. A second rock art site lies only about four metres to the north-north-west, suggesting this stretch of hillside was, at some point, a place where this kind of marking activity concentrated.