Field boundary, Gortlahard, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Gortlahard, Co. Kerry

In the hill pasture above the Sheen River valley in Gortlahard, a curved stone wall breaks the surface of a bog, tracing a gentle arc before disappearing back underground at both ends.

What protrudes is modest enough, about thirty centimetres above the bog surface, half a metre thick, and sunk some forty centimetres into the peat. It extends nine metres eastward, then bends northward for roughly twenty-five metres, the geometry suggesting an enclosure or field boundary that once had a much clearer purpose on the landscape than it does today.

The wall's curvilinear form and its partial burial in bog are clues to considerable age. Bog growth in Ireland is a slow process, and a structure swallowed to this depth and extent is likely prehistoric or early medieval in origin. The surrounding hill pasture on a west-facing slope would have been workable land in earlier periods, when communities managed livestock and cultivated ground at elevations that later became unviable. Particularly suggestive is the presence, roughly sixty metres to the south-east, of a fulacht fia, a type of ancient cooking site typically identified by a characteristic horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone, the byproduct of repeatedly heating stones and dropping them into a water trough. These sites are common across Ireland and are generally associated with the Bronze Age, though their precise function has been debated. The proximity of a field boundary to a fulacht fia is not unusual; both point to a period of active, organised land use that the encroaching bog has since quietly reclaimed.

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Pete F
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