Rock art, Coomasaharn, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
A flat sandstone rock lying almost flush with a rough pasture field above Coomasaharn Lake carries markings that are easy to walk past and nearly impossible to date with certainty.
The decorated surface measures roughly two and a half metres by less than a metre, occupying the western half of the stone, and it barely rises above the surrounding ground. What it holds, faintly pressed into the rock, is a vocabulary of prehistoric carved marks that recurs across Atlantic Europe but remains imperfectly understood: cupmarks, which are shallow hemispherical hollows pecked into stone surfaces, some left plain and some enclosed within concentric rings, connected here and there by meandering grooves and radial lines that extend outward or terminate in further clusters of small depressions.
The rock sits on a south-east facing slope at around 171 metres above sea level, with higher ground rising to the south and west and Coomasaharn Lake lying roughly 380 metres to the south-west. The carved motifs are concentrated towards the south-western end of the surface, where the most elaborate elements appear: one cup-and-ring motif about 18 centimetres across with two concentric rings, and another approximately 31 centimetres in diameter with three rings around a central cupmark. From one of these a short radial groove runs outward to merge into a series of wandering lines; from another, a groove leaves the outer ring and ends in a pair of cupmarks. A third example has a line of four minute cupmarks radiating from the central depression. The motifs were recorded by M.J. O'Kelly in 1958 and noted again by Finlay in 1973, and the site forms part of a broader concentration of rock art known from the Iveragh Peninsula. A second decorated rock lies about 15 metres to the east.
The surface is now heavily weathered and covered in lichens and black moss, with vegetation encroaching along the southern and western edges where some motifs are obscured entirely. The stone is fractured as well as worn, and the carvings are described as very faint. Raking light, particularly in low winter sun, tends to be the most reliable way to pick out shallow rock art of this kind, as the slight shadows cast across the cupmarks and grooves make them readable in a way that flat midday light does not allow.