Rock art, Mongnacool, Co. Wicklow

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Mongnacool, Co. Wicklow

In the hills around Mongnacool in County Wicklow, there may or may not be a set of ancient carved stones.

The uncertainty is the point. What was once recorded as a tangible prehistoric site has, over the course of more than a century, slipped quietly out of reach.

In 1884, the geologist and antiquarian G.H. Kinahan documented what he described as three blocks bearing oval depressions, noting that they looked somewhat like those on a comparable stone recorded nearby. Rock art of this kind, shallow cups and hollows pecked or ground into exposed stone surfaces, is a recurring feature of the Irish landscape, dating broadly to the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods. The meaning or purpose of such markings remains genuinely unknown. Kinahan's description was brief and his reference to the depressions looking "somewhat like those on D" suggests he was working comparatively, cross-referencing between sites in the area. When the location he indicated was revisited in 1990, the stones could not be found. They may have been buried by peat or soil movement, removed, or simply recorded with insufficient precision to relocate a century later.

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