Field system, Kimego, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ritual/Ceremonial
Beneath the blanket peat on the western slopes of Slievagh, above the cliff edge north of Cooncrome Harbour, lies a field system that predates the bog itself.
That is the quiet strangeness of the place: the peat grew over it, preserving walls that were already ancient, and it is only where the bog has been cut away for fuel over the centuries that the stones have re-emerged. The complex stretches across an area roughly one kilometre north to south and 600 metres east to west, making it one of the more substantial pre-bog landscapes on the Iveragh Peninsula. Where the walls are exposed, they run for lengths of up to 400 metres; elsewhere, archaeologists have traced their courses by probing through the peat.
Three principal walls define the system, running between the inlets of Coosfadda, Coosnamuck, and Coosatooig. The walls themselves are built from intermittent upright slabs and boulders with smaller stone packed between, averaging roughly half a metre high and slightly less than a metre wide. At the southern end of the complex, a curving stretch of walling forms a D-shaped enclosure roughly 125 metres by 100 metres, inside which sits a subcircular hut with an internal diameter of 9.1 metres; some of its drystone construction, the technique of laying stone without mortar, is still intact. Fourteen metres to the east of the hut is a smaller enclosure, about 4 metres by 2.5 metres, with a possible entrance gap at the north-west. Between the two features stands a row of three large upright boulders whose purpose is not recorded. Nearby, a natural mound called Cnocán na hAitinne contains a souterrain on its southern side, an underground stone-lined passage of the kind associated with early medieval settlement, used variously for storage or refuge. Several rectangular huts of poor preservation are scattered across the wider complex, including two on the banks of the stream that marks the system's southern boundary. The survey compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan for Cork University Press in 1996 remains the foundational description of the site, though some details have been revised since.
The third main wall, running close to the cliff edge, has been partly overlain at its southern end by a later, modern field system, a reminder that farmers continued working this same ground long after the pre-bog landscape had been forgotten beneath the peat. That layering of use, ancient stone buried under bog, then re-exposed and built over again, is what gives Kimego its particular quality as a place.