Rock art, Letter, Co. Kerry

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Rock art, Letter, Co. Kerry

On a stretch of mountain heath in Letter, County Kerry, a low sandstone boulder sits on a north-east-facing slope at around 159 metres above sea level, looking out over the Behy River valley.

It is barely knee-height at its tallest point, roughly two metres wide and just over a metre deep, and it would be easy to step over without a second glance. What makes it worth pausing at are the carvings on its east-facing surface, faint enough now that the eye has to work to find them.

The motifs belong to a tradition of prehistoric rock art found widely across Atlantic Europe, most commonly dated to the Neolithic or Early Bronze Age. Cup-and-ring marks, the defining form of this tradition, consist of a small circular depression, the cupmark, surrounded by one or more incised concentric rings. On this boulder there are three such compositions: a partial cup-and-ring motif in the north-west area of the stone, with a single ring running from east to south to west-north-west around a cupmark roughly ten centimetres across; two cup-and-two-ring motifs, one to the north-west and one to the south-east, the larger of these measuring 34 centimetres in diameter; and four additional plain cupmarks distributed around the north-east, east, south-west, and west of the surface. The stone itself appears naturally dimpled, though it has been suggested this surface texture may reflect deliberate preparation before carving. All the decoration is heavily weathered and faint, the rings only a few millimetres deep. A second rock art site lies approximately 40 metres to the north-west, suggesting this part of the hillside held some significance to whoever made these marks, even if what that significance was remains entirely open.

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