Rock art, Killelton, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Killelton, Co. Kerry

A sandstone boulder covered in prehistoric cup-marks, the small circular hollows pecked into rock that represent one of the oldest and most enigmatic forms of human mark-making in Ireland, might seem an unlikely find on a strand at the base of eroding coastal cliffs.

Yet that is precisely where this decorated stone turned up, lying on the shore along the southern edge of Tralee Bay, almost certainly dislodged from the ground above by the slow collapse of the cliff face behind it.

The boulder is modest in size, roughly a metre across and no more than forty centimetres at its thickest point, but its upper surface carries a considerable number of motifs. A natural ridge running across the stone, reinforced by a deliberately pocked line, divides the decorated face into two distinct zones. On one side, approximately thirty-eight cup-marks cluster together, ranging from three to eight centimetres in diameter, with the deepest example sitting at the highest point of the surface. On the other side, the marks thin out to around nine cup-marks, two parallel oval depressions, and a linear groove extending roughly thirty centimetres to the west. The combination of dense concentration on one half and sparser, more varied motifs on the other gives the stone an internal logic, though what that logic meant to the people who made it remains entirely unknown. The boulder was first recorded in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula.

The stone no longer sits on the strand where it was originally documented. In 1997 it was moved to a grass-covered road margin along the N86 Castlegregory to Tralee road at Camp, where it now rests in considerably more stable and accessible surroundings than the eroding shoreline that first brought it to light.

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