Field boundary, Gortnakilla, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Gortnakilla, Co. Kerry

On the southern slope of a ridge in Gortnakilla, County Kerry, a short stretch of ancient wall sits in rough pasture amid cutaway bog, almost entirely unremarkable to the passing eye.

What makes it worth a second look is its age: this is a pre-bog wall, meaning it was built before the surrounding bogland formed over it, preserving beneath the peat a record of a landscape that people once farmed, divided, and moved through.

The wall lies approximately five metres north of a wedge tomb, the type of megalithic monument built during the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, typically consisting of a roofed stone gallery that narrows, or wedges, toward one end and was used for communal burial. The proximity of the field boundary to the tomb is quietly suggestive. Both features belong to a period when this boggy Kerry hillside would have been open, workable ground, before the gradual accumulation of peat sealed the older land surface beneath it. Cutaway bog, where turf has been removed by hand or machine over generations, occasionally exposes exactly these kinds of buried features, returning them to view after thousands of years of concealment. Here, the wall and the tomb together form a small remnant of a prehistoric farmed landscape, the kind that once covered much of upland Ireland before the bogs closed over it.

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Pete F
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