Rock art, Loch An Dúin, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Loch An Dúin, Co. Kerry

On a boulder-strewn slope above the corrie lake of Loughadoon, on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, sits a sandstone boulder carrying marks that resist easy interpretation.

The three ringmarks carved into its surface are faint, closely spaced, and arranged in a neat line, yet they lack the central cupmark that typically defines this kind of prehistoric incised decoration. Whether they are the worn remnants of once-complete motifs, or carvings that were simply never finished, remains an open question.

Rock art of this kind, which generally refers to abstract symbols cut or pecked into natural stone surfaces during the Neolithic or Bronze Age, is found across Ireland, though the Dingle Peninsula has a notable concentration of examples. This particular boulder sits at around 134 metres above sea level on a steep east-facing slope, lozenge-shaped when viewed from the side and measuring roughly 1.8 metres across. Its decorated face looks directly towards the mouth of Loughadoon, where the lake drains into the Scorid River and eventually reaches the sea at Brandon Bay. The Brandon Mountain range rises to the north-west, and the visual relationship between carved stone, lake, and open water feels deliberate, though whether it was is impossible to say. About ten metres to the south-east, there is an unrecorded hut site, and a second rock art site lies approximately 170 metres further south, suggesting this stretch of hillside was not simply passing terrain for whoever left these marks behind.

The decorated surface itself is small, only around 40 centimetres by 15 centimetres, set at a steep north-east-facing angle on the boulder. The three ringmarks, each roughly 10 centimetres across, are incised with a ring just one to three millimetres deep, making them genuinely difficult to read in flat or overcast light. What draws attention here is precisely the ambiguity: marks that might be unfinished, or might be all that survives of something more elaborate, on a stone that overlooks one of the more quietly dramatic lake settings on the peninsula.

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