Rock art, Letter, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Letter, Co. Kerry

On a rough sandstone boulder on a mountain heath above the Behy River valley in Kerry, someone, at some point deep in prehistory, chose to mark the stone.

The marks are small, easy to miss, and have been worn by weather to the point where seeing them requires patience and decent light. That anyone made them at all, at 186 metres above sea level on a northeast-facing slope, is the quietly odd part.

The boulder itself is low and rectangular, measuring roughly 1.60 metres north to south and 0.90 metres east to west, sitting no more than 28 centimetres off the ground at its highest western edge. Its decorated surface runs most of its length and faces both north and south. The carvings belong to the tradition of prehistoric rock art common across Atlantic Europe, and the main motifs here are cupmarks, shallow circular depressions pecked into stone surfaces, whose exact purpose remains genuinely unknown. At the northern end of this boulder, a circular cluster of pickmarks roughly 9 centimetres across sits on a small area of the surface that appears to have been deliberately levelled before the carving began, suggesting some degree of intention and preparation. A cupmark 6 centimetres across sits 3 centimetres to the west. A second cupmark of similar diameter appears a full metre to the south on a north-facing aspect of the stone. All of it is heavily weathered. Around 15 metres to the north lies a second piece of rock art, so this is not an isolated marking but part of a loose cluster of decorated stones scattered across the same heath.

The site sits within a wider landscape shaped by bog and mountain, with a drystone field wall about 2 metres to the southwest and a stream roughly 10 metres to the west. A horseshoe of mountains encloses the site from the southeast around to the north, and the view down into the Behy River valley to the northeast is open and long. Whether that view mattered to whoever made the marks, nobody now can say.

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Pete F
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