That it came to light at all is a matter of accident, and the machine that unearthed it left its own marks on the surface, faint scratches that now sit alongside carvings made perhaps four thousand years ago.

The slab, measuring roughly 1.12 metres by 0.68 metres, was found in the late 1980s approximately 100 metres south of where it now sits, buried about four feet below ground level. When it was brought up, its decorated face was found to carry a particular vocabulary of prehistoric mark-making: cup-and-ring motifs, in which a shallow circular hollow is surrounded by one or more concentric carved rings; a cup-and-penannular ring, where that outer ring is left deliberately incomplete; seven plain cupmarks; and a forked groove. This combination of forms is typical of Irish and British prehistoric rock art, a tradition generally associated with the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods, though the precise meaning or function of these symbols remains genuinely unknown. The Iveragh peninsula has yielded a number of such carvings, and this slab adds a quietly particular example to that broader pattern, not least because its underground burial preserved it until chance brought it back to the surface.