Field boundary, Cummers, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Cummers, Co. Kerry

On the lower slopes of Knockanoughanish Mountain in south-west Kerry, a series of old field walls has been quietly dissolving back into the hillside for what may be centuries.

What makes these boundaries worth pausing over is not their scale but their construction: in the easternmost stretch, large upright stones, each standing around 0.8 metres high, were set at regular intervals of roughly 1.5 to 2.5 metres along the wall line, with smaller infill stones packed between them. That technique, sometimes called post-and-panel walling, is a relatively efficient way to divide land on rough hill ground, and it tends to survive better in skeletal form than a rubble wall built entirely of loose stone, since the uprights anchor the line even after everything else has fallen.

The walls run across rough hill pasture on top of and along the south-eastern face of a ridge, spreading into the townland of Cummers East. There are at least three distinct stretches. One, approximately 45 metres long, runs downslope from the area known as Lehid in a broadly south-south-westerly direction. A second, slightly longer at around 52 metres, meanders in a similar direction further to the south-east, and partway along it a third length of about 24 metres branches off to the west before curving back to the north. That branching and curving plan suggests a system of enclosures rather than a single boundary, a layout consistent with small-scale pastoral farming on marginal upland ground. All three sections have collapsed, and the surviving stonework now protrudes only just above the bog surface, the lower courses preserved by the peat that has accumulated around them over time.

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Pete F
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