Field boundary, Derrygreenia, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Derrygreenia, Co. Kerry

On the north-facing slope of Knocknaveacal in south-west Kerry, a collapsed field wall pokes up through the deep blanket bog in a way that quietly unsettles the usual sense of agricultural time.

Most old walls in Ireland are at least partially visible above ground, part of the working or recently retired landscape. This one has been slowly swallowed, and only the lower course stones still protrude above the peat, the rest reduced to rubble scattered along the wall's edges where the upper courses have long since fallen.

The wall itself runs roughly 75 metres downslope in a north-easterly direction, about 65 centimetres thick and originally standing to around 80 centimetres in height. Near its north-eastern end, a second wall branches away to the south-east for about 12 metres before turning north-east for roughly 45 metres and then swinging to the north-west, after which a further stretch of approximately 50 metres continues north-eastward along the general line of the first. The whole arrangement traces out what was evidently a divided or enclosed patch of ground, and the final section of wall terminates just south-west of a recorded hut site, suggesting this was once a small unit of settled or seasonally occupied land, a place where someone lived closely enough to need boundaries. Blanket bog, which forms where waterlogged conditions build up deep layers of peat over centuries, is itself a kind of archive, preserving beneath its surface the outlines of earlier land use long after the people who made those outlines have gone. Here, the bog has done exactly that, holding the lower stones of these walls in something close to their original position while the rest collapsed around them.

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Pete F
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