Field boundary, Gearhanagoul, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Gearhanagoul, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing slope above the Coomeelan stream in County Kerry, patches of stone wall push up intermittently through the surface of a bog, as though the land is slowly exhaling something it swallowed long ago.

The walls, roughly 0.7 metres thick and still standing to about 0.4 metres in height, trace an area of approximately 150 metres by 150 metres across the rough hill pasture of Gearhanagoul. On their own, submerged field boundaries are not unusual in Ireland, where blanket bog has been quietly engulfing earlier landscapes for millennia. What makes this particular network more arresting is what sits within it.

Associated with the field system are two confirmed fulachtaí fia and one probable example of the same. A fulacht fia is a type of prehistoric cooking site, typically consisting of a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone beside a trough, where water was heated by dropping in stones made red-hot in a nearby fire. They are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, found in their thousands, and most date to the Bronze Age, though examples span a considerable range of prehistory. Finding them clustered within a legible field system is a reminder that the people who used these sites were not wandering a featureless wilderness but moving through an organised, worked landscape, one with boundaries, enclosures, and presumably some form of land management that has since disappeared beneath the peat.

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Pete F
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