Rock art, Letter, Co. Kerry

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Rock art, Letter, Co. Kerry

A sandstone boulder sitting in a man-made hollow in cutaway bog near the Behy River valley is not obviously remarkable.

It is roughly 1.6 metres across and just over a metre tall, and much of its carved surface is obscured by lichen and moss. But look closely at the two decorated faces, and what emerges is an unusually dense programme of prehistoric mark-making, much of it so weathered that portions of it disappear beneath the vegetation entirely.

The carvings belong to the tradition known as cup-and-ring rock art, a form found across Atlantic Europe and broadly associated with the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods, though precise dating remains difficult. The technique involves pecking or grinding shallow circular depressions, the cups, into a rock surface and surrounding them with one or more concentric rings, sometimes with a groove radiating outward from the centre. On the north-east facing surface of this boulder, the motifs accumulate into something more complex than simple repetition. There are three complete cup-and-ring motifs, several with only partial rings, two with double rings, and one with three partial rings whose cupmark sits off-centre and which has a noticeably deep secondary cupmark pressed into its outer ring. A long radial groove, 36 centimetres in length, runs from one cupmark westward, crosses the shoulder of the stone, and continues for another 16 centimetres onto the north-west facing surface, where moss now covers part of its path. That continuity across two faces of the same stone is an unusual detail. Alongside these formal motifs, the north-east surface also carries a cluster of three cupmarks of varying sizes, as well as lines of pickmarks and meandering grooves. The north-west face holds simpler work: a shallow cupmark, two parallel grooves of pickmarks, one of which turns at a right angle, and a third shorter groove. Another rock art site lies approximately 11 metres to the north.

The boulder sits at around 207 metres elevation on a gentle north-east facing slope, with the Behy River valley opening out below and mountains rising to the south, west, and north-east. A disused turf bank lies about 5 metres to the west, and a bog trackway passes roughly 11 metres to the south-east. The hollow in which the stone sits appears to be man-made, suggesting the surrounding landscape has been worked and altered over a long period, layering more recent human activity around carvings that predate it by millennia.

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