Rock art, Letter, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
Two decorated stones sit in the rough hill pasture of Letter in County Kerry, each carrying a language that nobody alive can read with any certainty.
The first is a large earthfast boulder, roughly rectangular in outline and measuring around 4.4 metres in length, whose upper surface preserves a set of carved motifs on its south-western half. The second is a sandstone outcrop a short distance away, set on a north-east-facing slope at 218 metres above sea level, with views down towards the Behy River valley. What both share is the distinctive vocabulary of prehistoric rock art: cup-and-ring marks, the term used for the small, circular depressions, known as cupmarks, that prehistoric carvers surrounded with one or more concentric carved rings, creating patterns that recur across Atlantic Europe and beyond, though their meaning remains genuinely unknown.
The boulder carries a cup-and-three-rings motif, roughly 42 centimetres in diameter, conjoined with a cup-and-two-rings motif of about 25 centimetres, the two linked by a U-shaped groove whose terminals extend outward through the rings from each central cupmark. A third cup-and-ring abuts this groove from outside. Much of the stone's north-eastern half lies buried under a gorse-covered layer of bog, though the eroding edge of that layer has begun to expose further pock-marks and the arcs of two additional rings beneath it, suggesting the carved area may once have been considerably larger. The sandstone outcrop nearby is, if anything, more elaborate. Its decorated surface, divided by a natural fracture that the carvers appear to have incorporated into the overall design, carries a dense arrangement of cup-and-ring combinations, small secondary cupmarks clustered within and between rings, radial grooves threading between motifs, and at least one rectangular cupmark, an unusual form. The whole composition occupies a roughly triangular panel on the south-facing side of the rock, and despite heavy weathering it remains traceable across its full extent.
Both sites lie on rough mountain pasture scattered with rock outcrops and boulders, and the second outcrop is close to a watercourse draining from Coomnacronia Lake. The terrain is the kind that rewards slow walking and careful looking; the motifs are shallow and weathered, and low-angle light, particularly in the earlier or later parts of the day, is often what makes carved surfaces like these readable to the eye.