Field boundary, Teeromoyle, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Teeromoyle, Co. Kerry

On the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, a set of ancient walls sits mostly out of sight, buried beneath the peat that has slowly consumed the landscape over centuries.

Only the uppermost edges break the surface, rising to around half a metre above the bog, just enough to hint at what lies below. It is the kind of thing that rewards a careful eye and a certain patience with understatement.

The walls form a field boundary system at Teeromoyle, and what makes them particularly striking is their construction. Rather than the rounded, stacked fieldstone typical of later Irish drystone walling, these are built from upright slabs set at right angles to the direction of the walls themselves, a technique that speaks to a very different approach to organising land. Peat bogs preserve what the open air destroys, and the fact that these walls run beneath the peat at intervals suggests they predate the bog's formation, placing their origins well back into prehistory. The nearby walls, thought to be possibly contemporary with the boundary itself, follow the same buried pattern, implying this was once a more extensive managed landscape, divided and worked by people whose farming practices left traces the bog quietly sealed in place. Archaeological surveys of the wider Iveragh Peninsula, carried out by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996, brought this kind of submerged field system into clearer focus as part of a broader picture of early land use in South Kerry.

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