Rock art, Tullakeel, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
Sometime in prehistory, a person or persons chose a substantial boulder on an east-facing slope above the Ardsheelhane River valley in south Kerry and covered two of its faces with carefully pecked marks.
That boulder is still there, now pressed into service as part of a drystone field boundary, a holly tree growing close against its northern side. The fact that it has been reused as farm infrastructure at some point in the intervening millennia has done nothing to diminish the complexity of what was carved into it.
Cup-and-ring marks are among the most widespread and least understood forms of prehistoric rock art in the Atlantic world: shallow circular depressions, the cups, surrounded by one or more incised rings, sometimes with a groove, called a radial line, extending outward from the central cup. The Tullakeel stone takes this vocabulary and layers it densely. The south-facing surface, the more elaborately worked of the two, carries a grid-like network of linear grooves into which at least eighteen individual cupmarks are set, along with multiple cup-and-ring motifs. Among these is a cup-and-four-rings motif roughly 24 centimetres across, with a radial groove extending to the south-east, the whole surrounded by further cup-and-ring arrangements clustered nearby. A natural fracture running diagonally across the surface has been incorporated into the composition rather than avoided. The north-north-east face is quieter by comparison, carrying two cup-and-ring motifs with radial lines, one of them penannular, meaning the outer ring is left deliberately open rather than closed. This distinction between the two faces, one dense and almost programmatic, the other spare, is itself worth pausing over. The stone was first noted in print by Graves in 1877 and later by Finlay in 1973, and subsequent survey work on the Iveragh Peninsula by O'Sullivan and Sheehan in 1996 recorded and drew it in detail.
The site sits at roughly 94 metres above sea level in rough pasture, with a small stream about five metres to the south. Views across the river valley to the north, east, and south are largely obscured by trees. The decorated faces are set within the wall rather than presented outward, which means approaching the stone carefully and looking for the surface that faces south, where most of the motifs are concentrated.