Field system, Gurteen, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Gurteen, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing slope of Knockbrack Mountain in County Kerry, a set of stone walls lies half-swallowed by bog.

They protrude only about forty centimetres above the peat surface, and in places where the bog deepens they vanish entirely, as though the ground is slowly finishing a very long act of erasure. What remains is a relict field system, a term archaeologists use for agricultural boundaries that were abandoned long enough ago that the landscape has largely reclaimed them, covering an area of roughly one hundred and fifty metres east to west and a hundred metres north to south, overlooking the Glashagoruv River to the south.

The layout, though fragmentary, is legible enough to trace. A curvilinear east-west wall runs just south of a small eastward-flowing stream, and from it three further walls branch off to divide the slope below. The longest of these, a linear wall running south for about a hundred and forty-five metres, meets the road to Coomclogherane at its far end. Two curvilinear walls sweep away from the eastern end and the middle of the main wall respectively, their arcs and angles enclosing what appear to be three separate fields. Along some stretches, upright stones around seventy-five centimetres tall are set at right angles into the wall lines, a construction detail whose precise function is not entirely certain but which is found in other early field systems across the west of Ireland, possibly serving as anchoring pins or revetments to keep the wall face from spreading. The whole system sits in what is now pasture, grazed land that has inherited an agricultural function it may have held for a very long time, though the date of the original walls is not recorded.

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Pete F
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