Field boundary, Dohilla, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Dohilla, Co. Kerry

On the south-east end of Reenadrolaun Point in Co. Kerry, a stretch of rough pasture conceals something easily walked past without a second glance: the fragmented remains of walls that once divided the land into fields, their stones now half-buried, tilted, or scattered across the slope.

What makes the site quietly arresting is precisely this illegibility. The walls, both straight and gently curving, extend across an irregular area roughly 120 metres in one direction and 60 in the other, yet no coherent field pattern can be made out at ground level. The boundaries are there, but whatever agricultural logic once organised them has dissolved into the hillside.

Relict field systems of this kind, sometimes called relict or fossil landscapes, are the surviving traces of land management that pre-dates modern agriculture by centuries, occasionally millennia. The walls here stand around 0.9 metres high where they remain upright and are about 0.7 metres wide, dimensions consistent with the dry-stone field walls found across much of prehistoric and early medieval Ireland. They occur intermittently rather than as a continuous boundary, and upright stones protrude above the surface at irregular intervals while elsewhere the wall has collapsed into a low spread of loose stone. The site is recorded in O'Sullivan and Sheehan's 1996 survey of south-west Kerry, and it does not stand entirely alone: a hut site lies to the north-west, suggesting that whoever worked these fields also lived close by, on the same exposed peninsula above the Atlantic.

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Pete F
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