Rock art, Shronahiree More, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Shronahiree More, Co. Kerry

On a low, boggy hillock at the mouth of the Bridia valley in south Kerry, a slab of rock carries a set of prehistoric carvings that nobody has been able to find for certain in recent years.

The stone, roughly three metres by two, was recorded as bearing three annular rings, concentric circular motifs that appear across prehistoric rock art throughout Atlantic Europe, two of them crossed by a radial line. It is a modest but precisely observed piece of carving. The difficulty is that, as of the most recent survey, the stone was simply not there, or at least not visible.

The site was first formally described by archaeologists A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their 1996 archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, where it appeared as a documented, located find. When later surveyors returned to the floodplain on the southern side of the River Caragh, below the slopes of Mullaghanattin and Knockaunanattin mountains, they found rough, unimproved boggy pasture, a furze-covered hillock to the east of the supposed location, and no stone matching the description. The recorded dimensions differ slightly between sources too, one account giving 2.95 metres by 1.9 metres, another 2.50 metres by 1.80 metres. Even the stone's relationship to the river is disputed; one report places it 15 metres southwest of the Caragh, another puts it about 100 metres to the south. The surveyors noted that a low-profile stone in that kind of terrain could easily be swallowed by encroaching vegetation, or that the original grid reference may simply be slightly off.

What remains, then, is a carved stone that exists in the record but not reliably on the ground, a situation that is not entirely unusual for prehistoric rock art in Ireland, where sites are often vulnerable to overgrowth, agricultural disturbance, or accumulated peat. The annular ring motif, when it does appear, tends to date to the Bronze Age, though precise dating of rock art without associated finds is notoriously difficult. This particular example sits in good company geographically, within a Kerry landscape that contains many such carvings, but its current whereabouts remain genuinely unresolved.

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