Field boundary, Cummeenduvasig, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Cummeenduvasig, Co. Kerry

On a ridge above the Owbaun River valley in south-west Kerry, a wall is slowly disappearing into the bog.

It has not vanished entirely, and that is precisely what makes it worth pausing over. Roughly fifty metres of collapsed drystone construction still protrudes above the peat surface, running on a north-south axis and meandering slightly as it goes, as though it was never quite straight to begin with, or as though the ground beneath it shifted over the centuries and pulled it gently out of true.

Drystone walls of this kind, built without mortar by laying and fitting stones against one another, were the standard means of dividing and managing agricultural land across Ireland for millennia. What makes this one quietly unusual is its setting and its condition. It sits in rough hill pasture on a ridge in the townland of Cummeenduvasig, and rather than standing as a functioning boundary or lying entirely buried, it occupies an intermediate state, half-consumed by bog growth, its upper courses still visible at a height of around 0.4 metres, its width holding at about 0.8 metres. The bog has risen around it rather than swallowed it whole. This kind of preservation, where peat encases the lower portions of a structure while leaving the uppermost courses exposed to weather and collapse, is common enough in Kerry uplands but no less evocative for that. The wall does not announce itself; it simply continues to exist, overlooking a river valley it may once have helped to organise.

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Pete F
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