Rock scribing, Glanycarney, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Rock scribing, Glanycarney, Co. Cork

On a stretch of rough grazing land east of the Cousane Gap in County Cork, a large slab of bedrock carries a series of lines that someone, at some point, deliberately made.

The surface is mostly grey and lichen-covered, sloping gently to the south-west, but across it run lighter-coloured, pocked linear marks that cross and join one another in a way that is clearly not accidental. Towards the north-eastern end of the area, which measures roughly 3.4 metres by 3 metres in total, these lines resolve into something approaching a parallelogram, approximately 0.9 metres by 0.6 metres. Rock scribing, as this type of marking is known, refers to the practice of incising or pecking designs directly into natural outcrops or boulders, and examples are found across Ireland, though they remain poorly understood and are often difficult to date.

What makes this particular site quietly puzzling is the ordinariness of its setting. It sits on the north side of a road in the floor of a valley, the kind of spot that a driver would pass without a second thought. The Cousane Gap itself is a mountain pass through the Shehy Mountains on the Cork and Kerry border, and the valley to its east is agricultural and unremarkable to the eye. Yet here, in ground used for rough grazing, this sheet of bedrock carries geometric marks whose age and purpose remain unrecorded. The parallelogram form is suggestive of intentional design rather than casual scratching, but without excavation or comparative dating, it stays in the frustrating category of things that are clearly significant without being fully explicable.

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Pete F
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