Field boundary, Drom, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Drom, Co. Cork

Beneath the blanket bog on an east-facing slope at Drom in County Cork, a set of stone walls has been slowly disappearing for centuries.

What remains visible today are only the lowest courses, the base stones of two relict field boundaries protruding a mere twenty to fifty centimetres above the peat surface, their upper sections long since swallowed by the accumulating bog. It is the kind of site that rewards patience and a willingness to read a landscape rather than simply look at it.

The two stretches of wall form a rough junction. One runs approximately sixty metres in an east-northeast direction before meeting the second, which meanders roughly north-northwest to south-southeast for around one hundred metres. Both are built of stone to a thickness of about sixty centimetres, and where they survive to any height at all they reach roughly half a metre. Blanket bog, which forms gradually over millennia as waterlogged conditions prevent the full decay of plant matter, has preserved the lower fabric of the walls while simultaneously obscuring their full extent. Intermittent gaps break both stretches, whether from collapse, later disturbance, or simply the uneven way the bog has settled around them. The longer wall terminates about seven metres to the west of a hut site, suggesting this was once an organised agricultural landscape, a place where people not only lived but divided and worked the land around them. The walls and the nearby hut site together point to a settlement that functioned at some point in the past, though the bog gives up no easy dates.

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Pete F
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