Field boundary, Erneen, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Erneen, Co. Kerry

On the south-facing slopes of Barrerneen in County Kerry, a stone wall is slowly being swallowed by bog.

It curves across the hillside for roughly 130 metres, collapsing in places, surfacing in others, with upright stones still standing at irregular intervals to a height of around 0.8 metres. At its eastern end, the wall splits: one branch drops downslope to the south for about 15 metres, another climbs northward for a similar distance. What reads at first glance as a tumbled field boundary is, in fact, something older and more quietly suggestive, a system of enclosure that once organised this rough hill pasture into a landscape of deliberate human use.

The wall itself is modest in its dimensions, around half a metre wide and barely 0.4 metres high where it remains intact, but its survival above the bog surface makes it legible in a way that many such structures are not. Peat has a habit of preserving what it covers and gradually obscuring what it has not yet reached, so the intermittent appearance of this wall along the hillslope, emerging and retreating across roughly 130 metres, reflects the uneven growth of the bog over time. Two hut sites have been recorded in the immediate vicinity, which places this boundary in a broader context of past settlement. Together, the wall and the huts point to a period when these slopes supported not just grazing but habitation, people farming and living at an altitude that would today seem inhospitable for either.

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Pete F
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