Rock art, Knockbrack, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
A sandstone boulder sitting just above a Kerry pasture, almost flush with the grass, carries markings that prehistory left behind without explanation.
The stone is not dramatic in scale, measuring roughly 3.6 metres east to west and 1.2 metres north to south, and its decorated surface is smaller still. But within that subrectangular panel, at most 1.55 metres across, someone in the distant past ground and pecked a series of circular motifs into the rock with considerable patience and apparent purpose.
The markings belong to a tradition known as prehistoric rock art, found widely across Atlantic Europe and dating broadly to the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods. The motifs here follow the classic vocabulary of the form. At least fourteen cupmarks, shallow circular depressions typically a few centimetres across, are distributed across the surface. Alongside these sit three confirmed cup-and-ring motifs, where a central cup is encircled by one carved ring, with the possibility of a fourth, larger example faintly visible toward the western edge of the panel. The largest of the confirmed motifs measures roughly 20 centimetres by 18 centimetres; the smallest is 14 centimetres by 11 centimetres. All are described as being in reasonably good condition, which is notable given that the stone is fractured and lies in ordinary improved farmland rather than any formally protected enclosure. A second rock art site lies approximately 2.6 metres to the south, suggesting this low-lying corner of the River Maine valley held some significance, though what that significance was remains, as with most prehistoric rock art, genuinely unknown.
The location itself adds a layer of quiet strangeness. The stone sits at the base of a south-facing slope at around 21 metres above sea level, with a small stream roughly 75 metres to the south. Looking up from the carved surface, the Gap of Dunloe opens to the south and MacGillycuddy's Reeks rises to the southwest, a view that would have looked much the same to whoever made these marks.