Rock art, Kealduff, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
Sometime in prehistory, a person carefully pecked a series of concentric circles and small cup-shaped hollows into a sandstone slab on the Iveragh Peninsula.
That slab eventually ended up propped upright in a field boundary wall beside a trackway at Kealduff in Co. Kerry, where it has since been doing the unglamorous work of a boundary stone, its decorated face turned to the southwest. The motifs, known as cup-and-ring marks, are among the most widespread and least understood forms of prehistoric art in Atlantic Europe: small circular depressions, each surrounded by one or more carved rings, sometimes connected by a shallow groove cut outward from the cup at the centre, called a radial groove. Nobody is certain what they meant to the people who made them, or indeed precisely when they were made, though they are generally associated with the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods.
The slab itself measures 1.3 metres along its longer axis and 0.5 metres across, a smooth, unfractured piece of sandstone set into a stone wall that runs northwest to southeast along the northeastern side of the trackway. On its surface sit two clearly visible motifs: a cup-and-ring, roughly 9 centimetres in overall diameter, and beside it a larger cup-and-three-rings measuring about 12 centimetres across, the outermost ring only partial on its southwestern side. A linear groove connects the two. A third motif, a cup-and-three-rings recorded by archaeologists Aidan O'Sullivan and John Sheehan in their 1996 survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, sits further down the stone but was obscured by vegetation when the site was revisited. Another piece of rock art lies just 8 metres to the northeast, suggesting this area of rough pasture, sitting at around 142 metres above sea level, was once a focus of some significance.
The setting still carries a particular quality. The stone faces out toward the River Behy valley, with the mountains of Beenreagh, Macklaun, Knocknaman, Coomreagh, and Drung Hill ranged across the horizon. Whether that orientation was intentional, or whether the slab was simply repurposed from somewhere else entirely when the wall was built, is not something the stone itself will say.