Rock art, Letter, Co. Kerry

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Rock art, Letter, Co. Kerry

In a patch of wet boggy pasture in Letter, County Kerry, a low, roughly triangular boulder sits half-submerged in waterlogged ground, and on its upper surface runs a line that somebody, at some point, deliberately made.

The picked line, the visible portion of which measures just over half a metre, was created by repeatedly striking the rock's surface to leave a channel of small marks, a technique known as pecking or picking that is characteristic of prehistoric rock art across Ireland and Britain. It runs northeast to southwest, fading at the northeastern end into individual pickmarks just a few millimetres across before disappearing where the stone meets a natural crack. At the southwestern end, the line widens and then vanishes beneath standing water, so its full extent remains unknown.

What survives is fragmentary almost by definition. The boulder, roughly one metre along each side, sits low enough that the surrounding wet ground has crept over part of the carved surface, and it is impossible to say how much more of the design may lie submerged. Alongside the picked line there are shallow grooves on the rock, though these may be natural rather than human in origin. The ambiguity is itself telling: rock art of this kind, almost certainly prehistoric in date, often occupies a borderland between the legible and the uncertain, between deliberate mark-making and the slow work of weathering. Aerial photography adds a further layer of intrigue. Viewed from above, the panel appears to sit within a possible circular feature with a maximum diameter of around 22 metres, though no trace of that feature is visible at ground level, leaving open the question of whether the stone was ever part of a larger organised landscape.

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Pete F
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