Field boundary, Ardgroom Outward, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Ardgroom Outward, Co. Cork

On the lower north-facing slopes of Tooreennamna Mountain in west Cork, a network of old stone walls emerges fitfully from the surface of a cutaway bog, like something slowly surfacing rather than sinking.

The walls are collapsed and fragmentary, rarely rising above about forty centimetres, but they extend across an area roughly two hundred and fifty metres by one hundred and twenty-five metres, enough to suggest that a substantial system of land division once existed here, long before the bog crept over it.

What makes this place quietly odd is that no coherent pattern of enclosed fields can be read at ground level. The walls are curvilinear for the most part, which is typical of pre-medieval and early medieval field systems in Ireland, where boundaries followed the natural contours of the land rather than being imposed upon it in straight lines. Occasionally a stone sits at a right angle to the wall's main line, which may indicate a junction, a repair, or simply the way a wall collapses over centuries of frost and neglect. At the south-eastern end of the network there is a separate enclosure, a defined bounded space that may have served a different purpose from the field system itself. Whether all of this dates from the same period of use is not recorded, and the bog, which has both preserved and obscured the walls, gives little away.

The rough stony pasture around the bog edges still shows the kind of marginal land that was once, evidently, worth the effort of dividing and working. The walls that remain are not dramatic, but that is rather the point. They are the leftover geometry of ordinary agricultural life, half-swallowed by the ground, on a cold hillside facing north.

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Pete F
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