Field boundary, Fustane, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ritual/Ceremonial
On the southern slope of Mangerton Mountain in County Kerry, a stretch of old field wall emerges from the bog like a sentence interrupted mid-thought.
It runs east to west for roughly a hundred metres, then turns to the south-east, and then simply stops, absorbed into deeper peat. The wall is modest in scale, between half a metre and just under a metre high, and about sixty centimetres thick, but what makes it quietly arresting is the way it has been swallowed. Many of its stones have fallen or sunk into the peat; others remain upright, some of them set at right angles to the wall's main line, a detail that hints at deliberate construction rather than casual boundary-marking.
This is what archaeologists call a relict field wall, meaning it belongs to an agricultural landscape that is no longer in use and has since been buried or obscured, in this case by the gradual growth of blanket bog. The wall begins near the eastern bank of a stream, which would have made practical sense as a boundary point for whoever was farming this hillside. Exactly when that farming took place is not recorded here, but the encroachment of bog over former field systems in Kerry is a well-documented process, and walls like this one are sometimes associated with pre-medieval or early medieval land use, when communities worked ground that later became waterlogged and unworkable as the climate shifted and peat expanded across the uplands. The rough hill pasture that surrounds the site today gives some sense of how marginal this terrain has always been.