Rock art, Spunkane, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Spunkane, Co. Kerry

On the south-western spur of Knag hill in Kerry, at roughly 86 metres above sea level, a fractured crag of mountain heath carries some of the most quietly puzzling marks in the Irish prehistoric landscape.

Carved into two horizontal rock surfaces, separated by a sod-filled crevice, are clusters of cup-and-ring motifs, cupmarks, and linear grooves, all of them extremely weathered and, in places, further obscured by natural fissures that have deepened over the years. Cup-and-ring marks, to explain the term briefly, are circular grooves pecked into rock surrounding a central hollow, their purpose still not agreed upon, though they appear across Atlantic Europe and date broadly to the Neolithic and Bronze Age. Here the largest motif spans 57 centimetres across, its outer ring now so worn it is difficult to trace. One cupmark on the main surface has a radial groove extending 29 centimetres from its edge, a detail that makes it slightly anomalous even within a tradition that is already difficult to decode.

A record made by Finlay in 1973 noted a further decorated surface 40 metres to the west, carrying a cup-and-ring partly enclosed within a Y-shaped groove figure, a cupmark with a radial groove, and a short straight groove. Five metres to the south of that was a lightly picked square, an unusual geometric feature with few parallels in Irish rock art. Neither of those surfaces can now be identified, which gives the whole site a slightly melancholy quality: motifs that were documented within living memory have since been lost to vegetation, erosion, or both. More recently, a previously unrecorded shallow cupmark was found on a gently angled surface nearby, in an area where sod had been stripped back at some point, leaving bare rock with no lichen growth, which suggests the surface had been covered for a long time before it was exposed.

The site sits on a west-facing slope with open views towards Lough Currane to the south-east and Ballinskelligs Bay to the south-west, a position that feels deliberately chosen, though whether that matters to an interpretation of the carvings is unknown. The rock outcrop itself reaches a maximum height of 2.5 metres at its western edge, where it drops almost vertically. On the north side of the second decorated surface, sod and furze still conceal part of the rock face, meaning some motifs recorded in earlier surveys remain hidden beneath the vegetation.

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