Rock art, Ticlash, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Settlement Sites

Rock art, Ticlash, Co. Wicklow

On a south-western ridge slope above the River Avonmore in County Wicklow, a granite boulder sits slightly askew among a scatter of other stones, carrying marks that were already ancient when the first person thought to write them down.

The boulder measures roughly 1.1 metres long and carries thirteen cup marks on one face, shallow circular depressions ground into the stone with diameters ranging from six to seven and a half centimetres and only a centimetre or two deep. On a second face sits a larger bullaun-like bowl, about eleven centimetres across and four centimetres deep. A bullaun is a rounded hollow deliberately worked into a rock surface, often associated with early Christian or prehistoric ritual use, though their precise purpose remains debated. Taken together, the cup marks and the bowl make this a quietly layered piece of prehistoric carving, the kind that tends to sit unannounced in the landscape.

The boulder was first recorded and sketched by a researcher named Price in October 1931. At the time of that visit, the larger bowl sat on the uppermost face of the stone, with the cup marks running along one side. The current position of the boulder, resting on its side among a dump of other stones, tells a small but legible story: at some point between Price's October sketch and now, the stone was shifted slightly from its original orientation. That 1931 description was later published by Corlett and Weaver in 2002, giving the site its place in the broader record of Irish rock art. The Wicklow Rock Art Project, run through the School of Archaeology at University College Dublin under the direction of Dr. Clíodhna Ní Lionáin, subsequently produced a photogrammetric three-dimensional model of the stone, a technique that uses overlapping photographs to build a precise digital surface, allowing the cup marks and bowl to be studied in detail without any physical intervention on the rock itself.

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