Cultivation ridges, Inis Na Bró, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Cultivation ridges, Inis Na Bró, Co. Kerry

On the small Kerry island of Inis Na Bró, the ground itself carries the memory of farming.

Faint raised strips run across the landscape, the remnants of cultivation ridges, the parallel earthen banks that once defined manually worked plots where soil was mounded to improve drainage and yield. These features are quiet and easy to overlook, but they represent real labour, real seasons, and real people who once worked this ground.

The ridges sit in the near vicinity of a hut site, and their association with domestic settlement suggests a picture of small-scale subsistence farming, the kind of marginal agriculture that characterised life on Ireland's Atlantic islands for centuries. The detail comes from Cuppage's 1986 survey of the Dingle Peninsula, which recorded the pairing of these two features. Cultivation ridges of this type are sometimes called lazy beds, a misleading term for what was in fact an intensive method of hand cultivation, typically using a spade rather than a plough, and particularly suited to thin or waterlogged soils. Their survival on Inis Na Bró points to a period of settled occupation on an island that is today uninhabited or only lightly so.

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