Field boundary, Derreengarrinshagh, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Derreengarrinshagh, Co. Kerry

On a south-east-facing ridge in Derreengarrinshagh, a stone wall runs for roughly 130 metres across rough hill pasture before its shorter branches dissolve quietly into the bog.

The wall itself is modest, no more than half a metre high in places and just 0.6 metres thick, yet what draws attention is the detail buried within it: some of the stones are set at right angles to the main line of the wall, and the whole structure appears to rest not on bedrock but directly on the clay layer beneath the surrounding bog. That suggests the bog has grown up around and over the wall since it was first laid down, meaning the land was once drier and more workable than it appears today.

This kind of field boundary, low, rubble-built, and gradually being reclaimed by the landscape, is a common enough feature across Kerry's uplands, but it rarely gets much attention precisely because it looks so unremarkable at first glance. The wall's north-east to south-west orientation, following the ridge line, and the way its subsidiary sections branch off downslope before vanishing, suggests a once-functional system of enclosure, dividing grazing land or managing livestock movement across the hillside. Approximately 50 metres to the south-east lies a recorded hut site, which hints that this was once a small, self-contained pocket of upland activity, a place where someone kept animals, built a shelter, and marked out the ground they needed.

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Pete F
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