Rock art, Letter, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
On a heath above the Behy River valley in County Kerry, a low slab of sandstone carries two small hollows that have been there for thousands of years.
They are easy to miss. The stone itself rises barely seven centimetres above the ground at its highest point, and its surface is rough and fractured. Yet those two cup-shaped depressions, ground into the rock by human hands during the Bronze Age, represent one of the more quietly persistent forms of prehistoric expression found across Ireland and Atlantic Europe.
The stone sits at roughly 167 metres above sea level on a north-east-facing slope, with the Behy River valley opening out below it to the north-east and a sweep of mountains closing in from the south-east around to the north-west. The decorated surface is a relatively narrow band, about fifty centimetres across, and it is on this flattened section that the two cupmarks, the term for these deliberately carved circular depressions, are cut. The larger of the two measures approximately six by seven centimetres and is eight millimetres deep; the second, about thirty-four centimetres to its east, is slightly smaller at five centimetres across and six millimetres deep. Both are described as well-preserved. A second piece of rock art lies just over eleven metres to the south, suggesting this part of the hillside may have held some particular significance, though what that significance was is not recorded and remains, like the marks themselves, open to interpretation.
The stone is set in mountain heath, so the ground around it is likely to be uneven and damp, particularly away from summer. The north-east aspect means the decorated surface may catch raking light in the earlier part of the day, which can help make shallow carvings like cupmarks more legible to the eye. Given how low the stone sits, it rewards patience and a close look rather than a glance from standing height.