Rock art, Coomasaharn, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
A sandstone rock on a boggy hillside above the Behy River valley owes its discovery, at least in its current form, to the slow industrial work of peat-cutting.
When a section of the rock's surface was exposed by turf removal, it revealed a small decorated face, roughly rectangular, carrying markings that had been concealed beneath the bog for an unknown span of time. The carvings are faint, further obscured by patches of white and grey lichen, and require patience and good raking light to read at all.
The motifs belong to a tradition of prehistoric rock art found widely across Atlantic Europe, the age of which is generally placed somewhere in the Neolithic or Bronze Age, though precise dating remains difficult. The decorated surface, measuring roughly 70cm by 60cm on a northeast-facing aspect of an otherwise rough and fractured stone, carries a cup-and-ring motif, one of the most recognisable forms in this tradition, in which a carved hollow or cup is surrounded by one or more incised rings. Here, a curving radial line extends outward from the ring. There is also a possible keyhole motif, a form in which an enclosure opens into a channel, and nine simple cupmarks, small rounded depressions pecked into the stone surface, some of which are enclosed by linear grooves. Two roughly circular areas of pickmarks to the east and north of the central sub-oval area may represent further cupmarks whose definition has worn away over time. The rock sits at around 158 metres above sea level on a northeast-facing slope, overlooking the Behy River valley, and lies at the edge of a turf bank in cutaway bog.