Rock art (present location), Cork City, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ritual/Ceremonial
In a corridor of University College Cork, mounted on a metal shelf against the wall, sits a large sandstone boulder covered in prehistoric carvings that were made somewhere on a West Cork hillside thousands of years ago.
The stone now faces south under electric light, but its surface holds thirteen carved motifs, most of them concentrated across the upper portion, including five cup-and-ring marks, the characteristic prehistoric form in which a shallow circular depression, the cup, is surrounded by one or more carved concentric rings. The largest of these motifs measures roughly 25 by 24 centimetres, with a cup nearly 13 centimetres across and chiselled to a depth of 7 centimetres; two of the outer rings are truncated where the carving runs to the edge of the stone. Below the central grouping, six further cupmarks, plain depressions without rings, complete the composition, three of them well pronounced and three worn quite shallow. A long angular groove, nearly 68 centimetres in length, runs vertically between two of the right-hand motifs, and a shorter groove connects two of the central cups.
The stone's journey to Cork city involves an intriguing intermediary. It was donated to UCC from the collection of Admiral Boyle Somerville, and the donation is recorded as having taken place in 1938. Somerville, a noted antiquarian as well as a naval officer, is associated with Castletownshend in West Cork, and the stone is said to have originated at Gortbrack Farm, near Crookhaven, at an elevation of roughly 80 metres above sea level. The precise findspot on that farm is no longer known, which is not unusual for pieces that passed through private collections in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when prehistoric stones were sometimes moved, gifted, or simply carried home out of curiosity. What can be said is that the motifs are well preserved despite the stone's fractured and slightly rough texture, and that the variety in the ring depths, from deeply chiselled to barely perceptible, may reflect different hands, different tools, or simply the passage of time acting unevenly on the sandstone surface.
The stone is displayed at the western end of what UCC calls the Stone Corridor, on the ground floor of the Aula Maxima building. It sits at eye level, which makes it unusually accessible for prehistoric rock art, a category of monument that more often requires a muddy walk across open moorland to appreciate. The close viewing distance rewards patience; some of the fainter rings become legible only when the light catches them at an angle, and the shallow cupmarks below the main motifs are easy to overlook on first pass.