Field boundary, Derrysallagh, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Derrysallagh, Co. Kerry

Beneath the bog on a south-east-facing slope above Cummer Lough in County Kerry, the outlines of an ancient managed landscape are slowly re-emerging.

Collapsed drystone walls, no more than 0.4 metres high where they break the surface and roughly 0.8 metres thick, protrude from the peat across an irregular area stretching approximately 900 metres east to west and just over a kilometre north to south. These are not the walls of a single enclosure or field but the remnant skeleton of something far more extensive, a network of boundaries that once organised this hillside and the rough pasture it supported.

What makes the site at Derrysallagh quietly remarkable is not the walls themselves but what they contain. Within this network sit a standing stone, a standing stone pair, a stone row, an enclosure, a cashel, and a fulacht fia. A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, typically associated with early medieval settlement, while a fulacht fia is a burnt mound, the accumulated debris of a cooking or heating method common in Bronze Age Ireland involving fire-heated stones dropped into a water trough. The presence of these features together suggests that this hillside, overlooking the valley of the Dromoghty River, was not casually used but repeatedly returned to and organised across a very long period. The field boundaries themselves are most legible where the bog has been cut away in the south-east sector, and it is there that the scale of the underlying system becomes clearest, the peat acting, in the meantime, as an inadvertent archive.

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Pete F
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