Field boundary, Cill Mhic Iarainn Thiar, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Cill Mhic Iarainn Thiar, Co. Kerry

On the lower slopes of Beenduff Mountain in south-west Kerry, a set of old field walls has been slowly disappearing into the bog for centuries.

What remains is intermittent, collapsed, and easy to miss: low ridges of rubble, partly swallowed by shallow peat, tracing out the ghost of a roughly quadrilateral enclosure roughly 150 metres from east to west and 125 metres from north to south. The walls themselves, where they survive, stand no higher than about 0.4 metres and are around 0.6 metres thick, with rubble slumped and embedded in the bog on the downslope side. Several gaps break the circuit entirely.

These are relict field walls, meaning they belong to a system of land division that was abandoned long enough ago for the landscape to have largely reclaimed them. The curvilinear character of the walls, curving rather than running in straight lines, is typical of pre-modern Irish field systems, which tended to follow the natural contours of the land rather than impose a geometric grid upon it. The location, rough and stony hill grazing on shallow bog on south-facing slopes, suggests land that was marginal even when it was in use. Whoever worked this ground was farming at the edge of what the terrain could offer. O'Sullivan and Sheehan documented the site in 1996, placing it within the wider pattern of abandoned agricultural remains across south-west Kerry, a region where the retreat of farming from higher and boggier ground has left many such traces partly preserved beneath the peat.

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Pete F
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