Rock art (present location), Carnew, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Rock art (present location), Carnew, Co. Wicklow

At the entrance to a housing estate in Carnew, County Wicklow, a granite boulder carved with prehistoric symbols serves as an unlikely gatepost.

On one side it bears the estate's name, Coves Brook, and the year 1999. On the other, older face, are cup-and-ring marks, a form of rock art found widely across Atlantic Europe and Ireland, consisting of shallow circular depressions carved into stone, sometimes surrounded by one or more concentric rings, their precise meaning still debated by archaeologists. The stone now stands upright, its decorated surface held vertical, but this is not how it was meant to be read.

The boulder, measuring 1.6 metres long, 1 metre wide, and 0.8 metres thick, was almost certainly lying flat when the carvings were made, with the decorated face forming the upper horizontal surface. It was probably earthfast, meaning set into the ground, and so deeply so that only a small portion protruded above the surface. Plough marks scoring the edge of the decorated face suggest the stone spent a long period of its life barely visible, grazed by agricultural machinery passing over it. When construction of the estate began in the late 1990s, the boulder was unearthed, and, along with several other large granite stones now scattered across the estate's green areas, was repurposed as landscaping. Its original location is unrecorded, though the south-facing slope here, with open views towards Slieveboy in County Wexford, is consistent with the kind of elevated, outward-looking settings often associated with prehistoric rock art. The decoration itself is relatively well preserved: two double cup-and-ring motifs with enclosing rings reaching 12 and 18 centimetres in external diameter, a third cup with traces of a ring around 20 centimetres across, approximately six scattered cup marks across the main flat face, and two further cups on a raised ridge at the stone's edge. The Wicklow Rock Art Project, based at the School of Archaeology, University College Dublin, under the direction of Dr. Clíodhna Ní Lionáin, has produced a photogrammetric 3D model of the stone, allowing the carved surface to be examined in detail despite its current awkward orientation.

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