Rock art, Garrane, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Garrane, Co. Kerry

Beneath a modern farm road near Garrane in County Kerry, a prehistoric landscape is slowly surfacing.

Turf cutting in the area has exposed a series of ancient field walls extending across a zone roughly 140 metres north to south and 250 metres east to west, the remains of a pre-bog field system that was quietly buried under peat long before anyone thought to record it. A contemporary road now bisects this complex, dividing what was once a coherent agricultural landscape into two unremarkable-looking parcels of reclaimed pasture.

Close to one of these exposed walls sits a rock outcrop measuring just over two metres in length and one metre across, its upper surface covered in prehistoric rock art. Cupmarks, the simplest form of prehistoric carved decoration, are shallow, circular depressions pecked into stone, and this surface carries seven of them. Alongside these are eight cup-and-ring marks, where one or more concentric circles surround a central cup, and a single example with two encircling rings. Around half of the circles are incomplete, most likely worn away by weathering over the millennia rather than left unfinished by whoever made them. A scattering of pockmarks also appears to one side of the main group of motifs. The association of rock art with a pre-bog field system is notable: it places these carvings within a farming landscape, suggesting they were not remote or ceremonial in any obvious sense, but part of an inhabited, worked environment. The site is recorded by O'Sullivan and Sheehan in their 1996 survey of the region, though its precise location on the ground has not been confirmed by subsequent fieldwork.

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Pete F
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