Field boundary, Capparoe, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Capparoe, Co. Kerry

At Capparoe in County Kerry, a field boundary sits in the landscape doing what field boundaries are supposed to do, marking off one patch of ground from another.

What makes it worth a second look is the question it raises rather than answers: is it simply a working boundary, or is it something older, the remnant of an enclosure whose original purpose has been absorbed into the routine geometry of agricultural land?

The boundary's form closely resembles the enclosing element of a nearby archaeological site, and there is a possibility that the two are part of the same system, the field boundary not a later imposition on the land but a surviving fragment of whatever structure once defined that site. This kind of continuity is not unusual in the Irish countryside, where the lines farmers follow today can trace back through medieval, early medieval, or even prehistoric arrangements of space. The Iveragh Peninsula, the broad sweep of land in south Kerry that reaches out into the Atlantic and takes in the Ring of Kerry, has been surveyed in some detail, and it is precisely this sort of ambiguity, a boundary that might be ancient or might simply look it, that makes archaeological fieldwork in the area so painstaking.

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