Field system, Kealduff, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ritual/Ceremonial
Beneath the blanket bog at the head of the Glenbeigh horseshoe mountains in County Kerry, a substantial pre-bog field system lies largely out of sight, buried under centuries of accumulated peat.
Where the bog has thinned or eroded, up to fifty separate stretches of dry-stone walling emerge intermittently from the ground, the exposed sections ranging from 20 to 100 metres in length, averaging roughly 90 centimetres wide and standing between 60 and 90 centimetres high. Five rectangular fields can be traced across an area of approximately 1.1 kilometres by 750 metres, extending north-east from the middle of three lakes near the upper reaches of the Behy river. The scale of it is quietly disorienting: what reads at first glance as bare mountain terrain is, in fact, a fossilised agricultural landscape.
The walls predate the bog that now covers them, which means they were built when this high ground was still workable land. A radiocarbon date obtained by Mannion in 1983 places the onset of peat formation at Kealduff at around 2430 years before present, give or take about 110 years, putting the landscape change somewhere in the first millennium BC. The people who worked these fields also left behind three small hut sites near the western edge of the complex, all largely buried. The northernmost measures just 1.9 by 1.7 metres internally. A second, 270 metres to the south, is almost completely engulfed by peat, with a possible entrance gap of about a metre on its eastern side. The third, a further 370 metres south, survives as a ring of nine upright stones defining a roughly circular space just over two metres across. These are not the remains of grand structures; they are the traces of a working settlement, modest in scale and now almost entirely swallowed by the bog that ended it.