Rock art (present location), Togher More, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Ritual/Ceremonial
A schist boulder sitting in a field in Togher More, County Wicklow carries marks that nobody alive made and nobody alive fully understands.
Sixteen cup marks, shallow circular depressions ground or pecked into the stone's surface, cover its upper face, along with the broken remnant of a seventeenth where a corner of the boulder has at some point fractured away. Four of the largest cups, each between ten and twelve centimetres across and roughly six centimetres deep, are enclosed by incised circles, giving them the form archaeologists call cup-and-ring marks, a motif found across Atlantic Europe and dated broadly to the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods. A fifth has only a semicircle rather than a full ring around it. Three linear grooves, each a few centimetres wide and cut to a similar depth, run across the surface as well, adding to a composition whose original meaning remains genuinely unknown.
The boulder was not always where it now sits. It was turned up by a plough in a field approximately 1.8 metres to the south-west, in the townland of Baltynanima, and moved to its present location sometime in the mid-1980s. Its story as a recorded object, however, goes back considerably further. On 29th January 1933, a researcher named Price described, photographed, and drew the stone, noting at the time that the immediate area appeared to contain several more carved stones in nearby fields. Price recorded a flat flag with numerous small cup marks roughly a hundred yards to the south-east, a granite boulder with six or more small pits to the east, and a mica schist flag covered in cups to the south. As of 2005, none of those three additional stones had been relocated, according to research published by Corlett. They may still be out there somewhere beneath the soil of County Wicklow, or they may have been broken up and dispersed in the centuries since Price noted them down.
