Field boundary, An Lóthar, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, An Lóthar, Co. Kerry

On a boggy saddle between two hills in An Lóthar, County Kerry, a stone wall runs for roughly 120 metres through the heather before sending a branch off to the south-south-west.

That branch extends for about 75 metres, giving the whole structure a rough L-shape across the hillside. On its own, that description sounds unremarkable enough. What makes it quietly arresting is how little of it you can actually see: the stones protrude only intermittently above the bog surface, a mixture of boulders and flat slabs, many of them fallen or leaning at angles, the rest buried under centuries of accumulated peat and heather growth.

This is a curvilinear field boundary, meaning the wall follows a gently curved rather than straight line, a form commonly associated with early medieval or even prehistoric land management in Ireland, when farmers divided grazing land on marginal upland terrain. The wall sits just ten metres from a recorded hut site, which suggests the two features were probably part of the same small agricultural settlement, a cluster of structures marking out where someone once lived and worked on this exposed hillside in south-west Kerry. The site was documented by O'Sullivan and Sheehan in 1996, and the wall at that point measured roughly 70 centimetres thick and 55 centimetres high where it remained visible. Those modest dimensions, combined with the boggy ground conditions, mean the structure has the quality of something slowly being reclaimed, present enough to record but already more than half gone into the landscape.

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Pete F
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