Almshouse, Lackaroe, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Public Services
The name suggests charitable Victorian philanthropy, perhaps a row of modest dwellings built for the deserving poor, but what survives at Lackaroe in south-west Kerry is something older and harder to read.
On a south-facing slope above the valley of the Sheen River, a system of relict field walls spreads across roughly 180 metres east to west and 50 metres north to south, the stones long since collapsed and partly swallowed by shallow peat. The enclosures are small, the boundaries fragmentary, and the whole thing sits quietly in rough pasture, easy to walk past without registering what it once was.
The walls themselves are drystone construction, meaning they were built without mortar, fitted stone against stone in a technique used across Ireland for millennia. Some of the material appears to have been robbed out over time, the stones carted away to build more recent field boundaries to the south, which is a common enough fate for abandoned structures in agricultural landscapes. What makes the spot particularly layered is the company the field system keeps. In the immediate vicinity lie a fulacht fia and a hut site. A fulacht fia is a type of prehistoric cooking place, typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of burnt and fire-cracked stone beside a trough, and they are found widely across Ireland, most often dating to the Bronze Age. Their proximity here to the field walls hints at a landscape with a long sequence of human use, though the precise relationship between the different features is not recorded.
The designation as an almshouse in the site name is something of a puzzle given what actually survives. It may reflect a local placename tradition or a historical use of the site that has left no obvious trace in the ground. That gap between the name and the physical remains is itself a small mystery worth sitting with.