Rock art, Letter, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Letter, Co. Kerry

At nearly 200 metres above sea level on a gentle north-east-facing slope above the Behy river valley in County Kerry, a low sandstone slab sits half-swallowed by blanket bog.

Most of it is buried beneath peat on the eastern and southern sides, and what remains visible is rough, fractured, and barely twelve centimetres above the ground at its highest point. What makes it worth attention is what has been carved into its small exposed surface: two cupmarks, the simple circular depressions that represent one of the oldest and most widespread forms of prehistoric rock art in Ireland and Britain. Cupmarks are exactly what the name suggests, shallow cup-shaped hollows ground or pecked into stone, and while their purpose remains genuinely uncertain, they appear across upland landscapes throughout Atlantic Europe, often in places with commanding views or near water.

The decorated area of this particular slab is modest, measuring roughly thirty centimetres by ten. The larger of the two cupmarks is seven centimetres in diameter and five millimetres deep; the smaller, situated about twenty-two centimetres to the south-west, is five centimetres across but slightly deeper at eleven millimetres, a difference that may be partly the work of weathering rather than original intent. The motifs are worn but still traceable. Peat covers much of the surrounding stone, and there is a real possibility that further carvings lie concealed beneath the sod. A second piece of rock art has been recorded approximately two and a half metres to the north-west, meaning this is not an isolated find but part of a small concentration of decorated stones in this stretch of mountain heath, enclosed on the south, west, and north by a horseshoe of mountains and opening out toward the Behy valley to the north-east.

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