Com an Lochaigh, a valley cut deep into the western flank of the Brandon mountain range on the Dingle Peninsula, looks at first like little more than rough sheep pasture hemmed in by scree-strewn slopes that climb to 2,764 feet at Brandon Peak. The bog that carpets its floor reaches up to two metres in depth in places. But where turf cutters have worked their way down through that peat, they have exposed stone walls that predate the bog itself, the ghostly outline of a farming landscape that was gradually swallowed by accumulating peat over an unknown period of time.

The walls emerge in two groups on the northern side of the Feohanagh river, covering an area roughly 450 metres long and 150 metres wide, following the natural axis of the valley. The larger group, in the south-western half of the area, preserves long interconnecting stretches of walling up to 0.9 metres in height, though no fully enclosed fields have been traced. The walls appear to have been built directly on the mineral soil beneath the bog, which places their construction before the peat began to form over them. Turf cutting at the north-eastern end of the area has exposed something particularly intriguing: three of these pre-bog walls run directly into the base of a clochaun, a small dry-stone hut of a type associated in Ireland with early medieval and later pastoral use, suggesting the hut was built on ground that was already partly defined by older boundaries. On the southern bank of the Feohanagh, the cutting has revealed a separate and equally telling detail: preserved tree stumps, the remnants of a woodland that once covered what is now open moorland. Taken together, these finds point to a valley that was once wooded, then farmed, then progressively abandoned to the bog. Scattered across the surface above all this are the more legible remains of post-medieval life, disused field walls, sheep-folds, shelters, and the ruins of three or four houses near the valley head, a later chapter laid on top of a much older one.