Field boundary, Drombohilly, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Drombohilly, Co. Kerry

On a north-facing slope above Kenmare Bay, two curvilinear stone walls emerge from the bog at Drombohilly as if the land itself is slowly exhaling something it had swallowed.

The longer of the two runs upslope for roughly 75 metres before veering to the south-east for another 20 metres or so, while a second wall extends about 14 metres to the south-west. Both are collapsed for much of their length, though several stones remain upright, and rubble lies scattered through the surrounding bog. What makes this more than just a pair of ruined walls is the way they sit in the landscape, half-submerged in peat, tracing boundaries that someone once considered worth building and maintaining in rough hill pasture at the edge of the known.

The walls are curvilinear in plan, meaning they follow irregular, sweeping curves rather than straight lines, a form often associated with early field systems in Ireland, where boundaries were laid out to suit terrain and custom rather than geometric surveying. The bog has preserved them in a kind of arrested state, the peat slowly accumulating around stones that have not moved far from where they fell. Close by, roughly 20 metres to the north-east, lies a fulacht fia, one of the Bronze Age cooking sites found throughout Ireland in which water was heated using fire-cracked stones, typically in a trough dug near a water source. The proximity of the field boundary to one of these sites raises quiet questions about how this hillside was used and by whom, though the relationship between the two features is not spelled out by the surviving evidence.

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Pete F
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