Rock art, Dromavally, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Dromavally, Co. Kerry

What is now a low, undecorated stump of stone sitting in waterlogged pasture on the Dingle Peninsula was once something considerably more interesting.

The decorated stone at Dromavally carried three cup-and-ring marks and a larger, shallower hollow described as a saucer-like depression; cup-and-ring marks being among the most widespread and least understood forms of prehistoric rock art, consisting of carved concentric rings surrounding a central cup-shaped pit. No one knows with certainty what they meant to the people who made them, though they appear across Atlantic Europe from roughly the Neolithic into the Bronze Age. This particular stone did not survive the modern era intact. It was broken up and removed during land reclamation works, leaving only the stump behind.

The stone originally sat on level ground at the eastern edge of Dromavally Bog, a stretch of wet ground lying between the Owenascaul river to the west and the mountain range to the north. Its existence was documented by O'Connell as early as 1939, and it was later recorded by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, by which point the decorated portions were already gone. The site today sits at around 80 metres above sea level in rough, poorly drained pasture, hemmed in by coniferous forestry to the north and south, with only a narrow view opening westward down the Owenascaul valley. A pair of standing stones survives approximately 150 metres to the east, a reminder that this boggy, unremarkable-looking corner of Kerry was once a landscape that people marked and, in some sense, organised around meaning.

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