Field boundary, Inis Mhic Aoibhleáin, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Inis Mhic Aoibhleáin, Co. Kerry

On the small island of Inis Mhic Aoibhleáin off the Kerry coast, a low stone wall runs west for just over a hundred metres and then simply stops, its final stones sitting at the edge of a cliff.

It neither encloses anything on that side nor connects to another boundary; it just ends, as though the land itself ran out before the builders did, which of course it did.

The wall is built from large flat slabs, most of them no longer upright but lying recumbent, as stone boundaries in exposed Atlantic settings tend to do over time. At roughly seventy centimetres wide and sixty-five centimetres high, it is a modest construction, more a marker of intent than a barrier, the kind of boundary that says here rather than keep out. It extends from a field or enclosure recorded separately, heading due west until the cliff edge makes any further progress impossible. There is no record of when it was built or by whom, but its form is consistent with the dry-stone field systems that island communities across the west of Ireland used to divide grazing land and tillage plots, often working right to the margins of what the terrain would allow.

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