Field boundary, Kilbeg, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Kilbeg, Co. Wicklow

On the lower slopes of Sorrell Hill in County Wicklow, a scattering of low stone walls and hut foundations sits entirely outside the bounds of any modernly enclosed farmland, quietly resisting easy explanation.

The walls are easy to miss: averaging just 0.2 metres high and between 0.6 and 1 metre wide, they hug the edge of a scarp where the ground drops away into boggy, wet terrain. What makes the site worth attention is not any single feature but the combination of elements, six hut sites, clearance cairns, and these fragmentary field boundaries, all gathered within a compact and well-defined area on a gentle south-west-facing slope overlooking the valley between Sorrell Hill and Black Hill to the south.

The whole complex is thought to represent booleying, the seasonal practice of transhumance in which people and livestock moved to upland grazing during summer months, a pattern deeply embedded in Irish rural life from at least the Early Christian period onwards. The hut sites are arranged in a roughly linear fashion along the scarp edge, which would have offered both a firm footing and a view down over the boggy ground below. The clearance cairns, piles of stone gathered from the land to make it more workable, suggest some attempt at cultivation alongside the pastoral activity. The field walls themselves are unlikely to have been built to keep animals out of crops; they seem instead to mark out divisions of ground, perhaps to organise the cleared areas or simply to dispose of the stones removed from them. One L-shaped wall at the south-east end of the group is probably the remains of a later sheep pen, and a field boundary to the north-west likely dates to the nineteenth century, framing an older landscape within a more recent one.

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Pete F
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