Rock art, Neesha, Co. Kerry

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Rock art, Neesha, Co. Kerry

On a south-eastern spur of Macklaun Mountain in County Kerry, a sandstone boulder sits in open mountain heath carrying marks that are easy to walk past and almost impossible to date with certainty.

The stone is not large, roughly three metres at its longest, and it rises less than a metre from the ground. What makes it worth pausing over is a panel of prehistoric rock art on its upper surface, faint enough that the motifs require careful looking before they resolve into anything legible.

Irish prehistoric rock art of this kind, sometimes called Atlantic rock art, is found scattered across the upland and marginal landscapes of the west and south-west, and the carvings at Neesha fit the general vocabulary of the tradition. Cupmarks are the most common element of this art form, shallow circular depressions pecked into the stone surface, and there are at least two clear examples here, along with a possible third in the north-western corner of the boulder. A suboval ringmark, a roughly oval groove forming a closed ring, sits at the western end of the decorated panel. Two linear grooves run to the east of it, and scattered pockmarks appear randomly around them. The decorated surface faces north-east, which places it in the direction of the MacGillycuddy's Reeks and Carrauntoohill, Ireland's highest peak, though whether any orientation was intentional is not something the stone itself can answer.

The boulder is set within a landscape that opens out considerably once you are on the heath. The valley of the Meelagh River runs to the north-east toward Caragh Lake, and the view along it is long and unobstructed. The motifs themselves are described as very faint but traceable, which is worth keeping in mind; low raking light, either early morning or late afternoon, tends to make shallow carved surfaces more legible than midday sun, which flattens them almost entirely.

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