Rock art (present location), Forenaghts Great, Co. Kildare

Co. Kildare |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Rock art (present location), Forenaghts Great, Co. Kildare

A decorated boulder sitting in a churchyard in County Kildare is not where prehistoric rock art usually ends up, but that is precisely where this one now rests, relocated after a plough turned it out of the earth in 1975. The stone, a roughly metre-and-a-third in length and just under a metre wide, carries on one face a pattern of six groups of concentric circles, cupmarks, and combinations of the two. Cupmarks are shallow, roughly circular hollows pecked into stone surfaces, and together with concentric ring motifs they form one of the most widespread but least fully understood decorative traditions in prehistoric Europe.

The boulder is made of metamorphosed greywacke, a locally sourced rock that began as a dense, fine-grained sedimentary stone and was altered over geological time by heat and pressure. When it surfaced during ploughing at Forenaghts Great, it was found roughly a hundred metres south of Furness Church, and it has since been placed in the graveyard of that church for safekeeping. The find was documented by Shee in the mid-1970s and noted also by Meagher, which places it within a small body of scholarly attention that Kildare rock art has received, a county not traditionally associated with this kind of prehistoric carving. Most Irish rock art concentrates in the south-west, particularly in Cork and Kerry, which makes a decorated boulder in the Kildare lowlands a genuinely unusual outlier.

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