Field boundary, Ardgroom Outward, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ritual/Ceremonial
At the foot of Tooreennamna Mountain in west Cork, a series of old stone walls has been quietly surfacing from the bog, exposed not by archaeologists but by turf-cutters working their way through the peat.
What appears at ground level is fragmentary and easy to miss: low, collapsed stretches of stonework, with only the base stones protruding above the remaining shallow bog surface. The walls are curvilinear for the most part, bending and curving across the rough pasture in a way that suggests they were laid to follow the natural contours of the land rather than imposed upon it with any geometric rigour.
The boundaries occupy an irregularly shaped area roughly 650 metres across its longest axis, and they are the remnants of a field system that predates the formation of the bog above them. Bog growth across Ireland has, over centuries, swallowed enormous amounts of earlier agricultural and settlement evidence, preserving it beneath layers of peat in a state of accidental suspension. Here, the walls appear to rest on the underlying mineral soil, meaning they were built before the peat accumulated over them. The stones themselves offer a few curious details: many are set at right angles to the line of the wall, a construction technique sometimes used to give extra stability, and in places the boundaries simply vanish beneath deeper, uncut bog, continuing on unseen. The overall picture is one of a farming landscape frozen mid-collapse, its edges still dissolving into the ground.