Rock art, Letter, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Letter, Co. Kerry

In the cutaway bog above the River Behy valley in south Kerry, a flat sandstone rock carries markings that were sealed under peat for an unknown span of centuries before a turf-cutter's spade brought them back to light.

The stone sits at roughly 196 metres above sea level, its decorated surface barely raised above the surrounding ground, with a low, almost flush profile that makes it easy to overlook even when you are standing beside it. What makes it quietly arresting is the combination of its setting and its concealment: much of the carved surface remains buried under peat, moss, and waterlogged ground, so what is visible today is only a fragment of what the rock once showed.

The carving was revealed by peat-cutting in the late 1960s and first recorded by Finlay in 1973. The decoration, as documented by archaeologists A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their 1996 survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, covers the eastern half of the stone and consists of three adjoining subrectangular areas defined by incised grooves, with eighteen cupmarks distributed across them. Cupmarks are shallow, roughly circular depressions pecked into rock, one of the most widespread and least-understood motifs in prehistoric art across Atlantic Europe. Here, most of the cupmarks sit within the grooved subrectangular zones, and several are connected to one another by short grooves. More recent inspection of the stone found that only the northern portion of the decorated surface is now accessible; the rest lies beneath bog and standing water. That visible section includes a smaller rectilinear area defined by pickmarks, enclosing two cupmarks and a single distinct pickmark, with further cupmarks at the edges of the exposed area. The motifs themselves have suffered from freeze-thaw weathering, which has roughened and fractured the sandstone surface over time.

The rock lies in an area of cutaway bog, with a turfbank roughly 1.4 metres to the south-east and a stream about 27 metres to the north-west. The broader landscape, looking out over the River Behy valley to the north-east, gives some sense of why this elevated, open location might have held significance for whoever made the carvings, though that significance remains, as with most prehistoric rock art, entirely a matter of speculation.

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