Field boundary, Cummeenduvasig, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Cummeenduvasig, Co. Kerry

On the southern slope of Mangerton Mountain in County Kerry, a wall that no longer quite exists traces a path through the bog.

It does not enclose anything visible, does not mark a boundary that anyone currently observes, and rises only about thirty centimetres above the surface of the ground. What it does do is move: emerging from the peat, extending northward for roughly sixty metres, then curving to the north-east for another forty-five before the bog swallows it again. The stones do not form a continuous structure so much as a dotted line, a scatter of protrusions that the landscape has been slowly absorbing for an indeterminate length of time.

This is a relict field wall, meaning it is the remnant of an agricultural boundary that was in use at some point in the past, before the land around it changed character or was simply abandoned. The bog that now surrounds it is a later development, or at least a deeper one; peat accumulation can preserve and simultaneously obscure features like this, holding them in a kind of suspended state where they are neither fully buried nor fully legible. The wall itself is about seventy centimetres thick at its surviving base, modest by any measure, and built from whatever stone was available on the hill pasture of Cummeenduvasig. No date has been established for its construction, and no particular community or period of farming has been attached to it. It is simply there, or partly there, in rough hill ground on the Kerry uplands.

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Pete F
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