Field boundary, Dooneens, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Dooneens, Co. Cork

Two low sections of dry-stone walling sitting in rough pasture and bog in Dooneens, County Cork, might not stop most walkers in their tracks.

Barely two courses high and no more than thirty centimetres off the ground, they are easy to miss and easier still to dismiss. Yet these fragments, oriented northeast to southwest and built from uncoursed, medium-sized stones, are recorded alongside the remains of a hut, and together they suggest some former organisation of this boggy landscape, a small world of enclosure and shelter now almost entirely reclaimed by the ground.

The walls were documented by Quinn and Carroll in 2010 as part of an archaeological assessment carried out ahead of a proposed wind farm at Dooneens. At that point the two sections measured twelve metres and ten metres in length respectively, each around 0.6 metres wide. Uncoursed field walls of this kind, meaning the stones are laid without the regular horizontal rows you would see in more carefully constructed masonry, are a common feature of marginal agricultural land across Munster, often associated with small-scale pastoral farming or the seasonal use of upland and boggy ground. What makes this particular survival worth noting is its isolation and its association with the hut remains nearby, pointing to a coherent, if modest, pattern of past land use on ground that now looks entirely unworked.

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