Field boundary, Drombohilly, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Drombohilly, Co. Kerry

On a rocky, west-facing slope at Drombohilly in south-west Kerry, a set of old field walls emerges from the surface of the bog like a half-forgotten argument with the land.

They do not form a neat grid or an obvious enclosure; they meander intermittently across the hillside, covering an area roughly 1.15 kilometres from east to west and around 520 metres from north to south. That scale, spread across rough upland pasture, suggests this was once a seriously worked landscape, one that has since been reclaimed by bog and time.

What survives are low stone walls, each around 65 centimetres thick and 70 centimetres tall, that protrude just above the bog surface. Their construction is telling: the base stones are laid at right angles to the line of the wall, a technique that provides stability on uneven or waterlogged ground. Alongside the walls, the remains of cultivation ridges are still visible. These ridges, sometimes called lazy beds in the Irish context, were a method of intensive tillage suited to poorly drained or thin soils, where earth and sods were mounded up into parallel raised strips to improve drainage and maximise yield. The fact that both field boundaries and cultivation ridges survive together points to a landscape that was once farmed with considerable effort, probably by communities working marginal ground that has long since been abandoned to the bog.

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