Field boundary, Derrymihin, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Ritual/Ceremonial
On the southern slopes of Maulin in County Cork, a stretch of bogland has given up something it kept buried for a very long time.
Turf-cutting, the traditional practice of harvesting dried peat for fuel, has gradually stripped back the shallow bog here to reveal the ghostly outlines of a network of stone field boundaries that nobody was farming within living memory. The walls emerge intermittently across a roughly rectangular area of around 550 metres by 150 metres, their tops and sides protruding from the peat in a landscape of cutaway bog and rough hill pasture. What makes them quietly arresting is their construction: some stretches are built from upright slabs set at right angles to the line of the wall, a technique that gives them a distinctive comb-like profile when seen from above, while other sections simply jut from the faces of turf banks that cutters long since abandoned.
These are relict field boundaries, meaning they belong to an agricultural system that fell out of use and was subsequently sealed beneath accumulating peat. The walls reach a maximum height of around 0.65 metres and a maximum thickness of 0.55 metres, modest dimensions but enough to have divided and defined land with some deliberateness. The gently curving lines of the walls suggest organic boundaries rather than any later planned enclosure, and the fact that they extend into the neighbouring townland of Rodeen implies they once formed part of a wider, coherent landscape of managed ground. Roughly 250 metres to the north, two hut sites have also been recorded, hinting that the field system was not an isolated feature but belonged to a settlement, however temporary or seasonal, that has otherwise left almost no trace above the bog surface.
