Rock art (present location), Cork City, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Rock art (present location), Cork City, Co. Cork

Along the way, this sandstone boulder lost its original context entirely.

It was found built into a field wall in Mothel, Co. Waterford, repurposed as ordinary building material, its decorated face presumably turned inward or outward without much thought. Nobody now knows where it stood before that, or what landscape it once belonged to. Today it sits indoors, mounted on a custom-made metal shelf at the western end of the Stone Corridor in University College Cork, a prehistoric artefact preserved inside a Victorian university building.

The stone itself is a smooth, unfractured sandstone boulder, roughly 63 centimetres wide and 56 centimetres tall, with a decorated surface of about 40 by 40 centimetres on its southern face. Carved into that surface are fifteen motifs, concentrated toward the lower portion of the stone. Cup-and-ring marks, the most common form of prehistoric rock art in Ireland and Britain, consist of a small circular depression, the cup, surrounded by one or more incised concentric rings. On this boulder, eight such motifs cluster together at a fairly consistent size of around 8 to 9 centimetres in diameter, alongside a larger example measuring roughly 15 by 14 centimetres. One of the motifs in the south-west appears to have a partial outer ring that connects it to three neighbouring cup-and-ring marks, creating a loose chain of forms. Three plain cupmarks sit near the lower edge of the stone, and a short line of three small pickmarks runs along the western side. The motifs date to the Bronze Age, though their precise meaning remains, as with most prehistoric rock art, entirely unresolved. The stone was acquired at some point by the Reverend Canon Patrick Power before being donated to University College Cork.

The Stone Corridor is part of the Aula Maxima on the ground floor of UCC's main quadrangle building, and the boulder is well-preserved and clearly visible on its shelf. It is an odd experience to encounter something so ancient in such a setting, stripped of landscape, sky, and any sense of its original purpose, reduced to an object among objects, quietly covered in marks that nobody living can read.

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