Rock art, Letter, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a north-east facing slope of rocky mountain heath in County Kerry, at around 191 metres above sea level, a fractured sandstone boulder sits quietly amid the landscape with fourteen small circular depressions worked into its surface.
These are cupmarks, one of the most common forms of prehistoric rock art found across Ireland and Britain: shallow, roughly circular hollows picked into stone by hand, their precise meaning still debated but their deliberate manufacture unmistakeable. What makes this particular boulder quietly compelling is not just the cupmarks themselves but the variety of markings surrounding them, each apparently placed with some intention.
The boulder is modest in size, roughly 83 centimetres along its longest axis, and irregular in plan. Its decorated surface, oriented with a south-west-facing aspect, bears the fourteen cupmarks arranged in distinct clusters, with additional pickmarks scattered nearby. At the western end of the surface, a circle of pickmarks has been worked into the stone, while along the northern side of the cupmark field runs a linear arrangement of pickmarks about 20 centimetres long and only 2 centimetres wide, suggesting something closer to a line or groove than a scattered cluster. At the eastern end, on a slightly raised part of the stone, sits a particularly well-preserved cluster of pickmarks, each around 7 millimetres in diameter and 3 to 4 millimetres deep, their edges still crisp. On the southern face, the effects of repeated freeze-thaw weathering are visible, a reminder of how slowly time works on sandstone at this altitude. A second rock art site lies only about 4 metres to the north-east, and the remains of a hut site sit roughly 10 metres to the south-south-west, placing this decorated stone within what was once, in some prehistoric period, a lived-in landscape rather than a remote wilderness.
The setting adds a particular quality to the site. From the boulder, the Behy river valley opens out to the north-east, with the Seefin and Droum Mountains forming the background. A small dry valley lies immediately to the south-east. Whether the orientation of the decorated surface toward the south-west, or the view to the north-east, held any significance for whoever made these marks is unknown, but the placement feels considered rather than incidental.