Rock art, Kealduff, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Kealduff, Co. Kerry

On a NE-facing slope above the River Behy valley in County Kerry, a smooth rectangular slab of stone carries four carved cruciform motifs, arranged in a neat vertical line.

The slab measures roughly 1.5 metres by 0.45 metres, and its decorated face tilts upward toward the south-southwest. What makes the carvings particularly interesting is that they are not uniform: the upper two crosses are formed of simple, irregular grooves, while the lower pair are more elaborate, their grooves terminating in cupmarks, small cup-shaped depressions, enclosed within complete or near-complete rings. The lowest motif has been partially lost to spalling, where flakes of stone have broken away from the surface over time. The whole arrangement is, in the understated language of archaeology, rather weathered.

Rock art of this kind belongs to a broad prehistoric tradition found across Atlantic Europe, though the meanings and purposes behind such carvings remain genuinely uncertain. Cupmarks and ring motifs are among the most common elements in Irish prehistoric rock art, and their appearance here alongside cruciform designs gives this particular slab a character that sets it apart from purely abstract cup-and-ring compositions. The site is documented in the 1996 archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, a substantial survey of South Kerry's prehistoric and early historic landscape, published by Cork University Press.

Finding the slab is another matter. The hillside at Kealduff is covered in dense mountain heath, and a thick growth of furze, the spiny yellow-flowered shrub that colonises ungrazed upland ground, reaches in places to well over a metre in height. That vegetation actively obscures low-lying rocks and boulders, and surveyors working from the 1996 record have noted the slab as not located in subsequent fieldwork. The views across the River Behy valley are clear enough on a good day; the rock art itself, for now, remains effectively swallowed by the hillside.

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