Rock art, Teeromoyle, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the lower slopes of Teeromoyle mountain in County Kerry, a sandstone boulder sits in rough mountain pasture at 248 metres above sea level, its surface carrying marks that predate any written record of the place by thousands of years.
The stone is not especially large, measuring roughly 2.4 metres along its longest axis, but its upper face has been worked with a deliberateness that stops you short. Cupmarks, the shallow circular depressions that are the most common motif in Irish prehistoric rock art, appear across a rectangular decorated surface roughly 74 by 67 centimetres. There are eight of them on the lower plane, ranging from four to seven centimetres in diameter, along with a ring and a series of linear grooves. Three of the cupmarks fall precisely at the intersections of those grooves, suggesting the composition was considered rather than incidental. A single further cupmark sits on a raised ledge about 35 centimetres higher, slightly apart from the main grouping, as if placed there as an afterthought or perhaps as something else entirely.
The grooves themselves are worth pausing over. A main linear groove runs 61 centimetres across the width of the stone, with a cupmark incorporated into its south-western side. A faint radial groove extends outward from that same side, and a curvilinear groove branches away at a right angle from the north-eastern edge of the main line, terminating at the base of the raised ledge. The effect is of a surface that has been returned to more than once, with motifs added in relation to what was already there. The boulder sits on a south-facing slope with open views down into the River Ferta valley, and while it is impossible to say what significance that orientation held for the people who made these marks, it is difficult to imagine they were indifferent to it. The stone itself is deeply fissured, its cracks filled with moss and grasses, and the motifs, though weathered, remain traceable to a careful eye.