Rock art, Letter, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Letter, Co. Kerry

On the eastern slopes of Beenmore, on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, a low sandstone rock sits almost flush with the surrounding cutaway bog.

It is easy to overlook, rising no more than ten centimetres at its highest point, yet its surface carries a carefully worked triangular field of prehistoric decoration that has survived, quietly and imperfectly, for thousands of years.

The rock measures roughly 3.6 metres east to west and 1.9 metres north to south, and its decorated face is divided by a network of linear grooves into distinct areas. Across that surface are nineteen cupmarks, small circular depressions pecked into the stone that typically range here from four to nine centimetres in diameter, along with two cup-and-ring motifs concentrated at the eastern side. Cup-and-ring marks consist of a central cup surrounded by one or more incised rings, and they appear across Atlantic Europe and Ireland during the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods, though their precise meaning remains genuinely unknown. The larger of the two rings at this site has an unusual squared rather than circular outline, and the individual pickmarks used to cut it are still clearly visible. The site sits at roughly 204 metres above sea level, wedged between two parallel turf banks left by bog cutting, and looks out north-eastward over the Behy River valley below Coomnacronia Lake. The decorated surface was documented in detail by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their 1996 archaeological survey of south Kerry, and a later field inspection confirmed the motifs remain well defined, though freeze-thaw weathering is taking a toll on the sandstone. Moss has been advancing along the southern and western margins since that earlier survey, and some motifs that were clearly visible in 1996 had by the time of the more recent inspection already disappeared beneath moss and pooled water at the north-western corner.

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