Rock art, Kealduff, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Kealduff, Co. Kerry

On the mountain heath above the River Behy valley in south Kerry, at around 145 metres above sea level, a flat rock carries a set of marks that nobody made recently and nobody fully understands.

The decorated surface measures 2.2 metres by 1.75 metres and tilts steeply upward to the south-west. Prehistoric rock art of this kind, found widely across Ireland and Britain, typically dates to the Neolithic or early Bronze Age, though the precise meaning of the motifs remains genuinely contested among archaeologists.

The carving on this particular stone is a small catalogue of the standard vocabulary of Atlantic rock art. There are three simple cupmarks, which are shallow circular depressions pecked into the rock surface; one cup with a radial groove extending outward from it; and six cup-and-ring marks, where one or more concentric rings surround a central cup. Among those six, two rings appear gapped, probably as a result of weathering over millennia, two have radial grooves running through them, and two show light pocking within the enclosed spaces between the rings. Three meandering grooves also run across the stone, the longest of them near its centre. The combination of tightly formed rings, radial channels, and wandering lines on a single surface is not unusual for the tradition, but the particular arrangement here, catalogued by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their 1996 survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, gives the stone its own character.

The site sits on a north-east-facing slope with open views across to the River Behy valley, and its setting in open mountain heath means the carvings are subject to ongoing exposure. Precise location details for this stone are not on record, which means it remains, in a practical sense, unverified in the field and difficult to find without local knowledge.

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