Field boundary, Kimego, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Kimego, Co. Kerry

On a wind-exposed ridge in Kimego, Co. Kerry, two curvilinear stone walls curve away from a possible hut site through gorse and bog, their stones half-swallowed by the landscape they once organised.

Neither wall is especially tall, the better-preserved of the two reaching only about half a metre above the surface, and neither runs very far, one extending roughly forty metres westward onto the ridge, the other winding some thirty-five metres in a south-easterly direction through a marshy hollow below. What makes them worth attention is less their scale than their persistence: these are the faint but legible traces of a system of land management that once made a life possible on this rough hill ground.

Curvilinear field boundaries of this kind are commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, where farming communities divided grazing and cultivated ground using walls that followed the natural contours of the land rather than imposing a rigid grid upon it. The two walls here both originate near what has been identified as a possible hut site, suggesting a small farmstead whose occupants marked out their territory in stone across the slope and down into the hollow. The second wall, which runs through the marshy ground, is built mainly of slab-type stones set upright along the line of the wall, a practical choice where the bog surface offered little stable footing for the kind of rubble construction more typical on drier ground. O'Sullivan and Sheehan recorded the site in 1996, by which point the gorse had already done considerable work in obscuring the western wall, leaving its stones jumbled and difficult to read as a continuous structure.

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Pete F
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