Rock art, Kealduff, Co. Kerry

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Rock art, Kealduff, Co. Kerry

In a cutaway bog at Kealduff in County Kerry, a low-lying slab of rock sits mostly swallowed by the ground, its surface uneven and irregular, and on it, barely visible to the naked eye, are carvings that predate written history by several thousand years.

The rock measures roughly 3.4 metres north to south and 2.8 metres east to west, though only portions of it are exposed. What survives on that exposed surface is faint, close to erasure, and easily missed.

The principal motifs are two conjoined cup-and-ring carvings near the north-eastern edge of the exposed surface, each around 12 centimetres in diameter. Cup-and-ring marks are a form of prehistoric rock art found widely across Atlantic Europe and Ireland, consisting of a small circular hollow, the cup, surrounded by one or more incised concentric rings. Their meaning remains genuinely unknown. Centrally on the rock there is also a portion of a line of picking, and elsewhere on the surface further carvings are present but extremely faint. Whoever made these marks chose the spot with some deliberateness: the panel looks west towards Loch Naparka, takes in the full sweep of the Glenbeigh Horseshoe mountains from the north-east round to the north-west, and catches a distant glimpse of Dingle Bay in the gap between the Curra Hills and Seefin. Whether that panorama carried meaning for the carvers, or whether the rock simply happened to be here and the view is coincidence, is one of those questions the bog is not giving up.

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