The structures had the right dimensions, the right roughness, the right air of antiquity. Someone, at some point, wrote them down as the dead's domain.

The reclassification is quietly deflating, and quietly funny. What the National Museum of Ireland recorded as potential burial features on the Iveragh Peninsula are now considered, following later research compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their 1996 archaeological survey of South Kerry, to be sheepfolds. A sheepfold is exactly what it sounds like: a small enclosure, usually of dry stone, used to pen sheep temporarily on open upland grazing. They are functional, vernacular, and entirely mundane. On a mountain slope, half-collapsed and overgrown, one can see how the confusion arose. The proportions of a low stone cist and a modest field enclosure are not so different when both have been abandoned to the weather for a century or two.