Rock art, Shronahiree More, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Shronahiree More, Co. Kerry

On a small but conspicuous hillock in the mountain heath of Shronahiree More, a large sandstone boulder sits facing south-east, carrying marks that most walkers would pass without a second glance.

The boulder is substantial, nearly five metres along its longest axis and over two metres high at its tallest point, yet the carvings on its otherwise flat upper surface are so worn as to be almost invisible. These are prehistoric rock art motifs, a category of Neolithic and Bronze Age carving found widely across Ireland and Britain, typically consisting of abstract forms whose original purpose remains genuinely unclear to archaeologists.

The decorated surface measures roughly a metre by one and a half metres, and within it three motifs have been identified, all extremely faint. The most distinctive is a semi-circular ring groove, open on its south-western to north-western side, positioned centrally along the northern edge of the stone. At the point where the groove terminates to the south-west, a shallow hollow has collected water, while the north-western terminus has been broken by freeze-thaw fracturing, the same cyclical process of ice expansion and contraction that has roughened and cracked the boulder's surface more broadly. Cupmarks, which are simple bowl-shaped depressions pecked into the rock surface, appear further south on the stone: a larger one, approximately seven and a half centimetres across and nearly two centimetres deep, is cut through by a fracture running almost the full length of the boulder, and a smaller, less certain cupmark sits about thirty-six centimetres beyond that. The stone shares the hillock with other large boulders, but none of these appear to carry comparable markings.

The motifs here are at the fragile end of legibility. Freeze-thaw action has worked on them for millennia, and what survives is faint enough that lighting conditions will make a considerable difference to what the eye can pick out. Low raking light, particularly in the early morning or late afternoon, tends to bring shallow carved surfaces like these into sharper relief.

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