Field boundary, Killelan, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Killelan, Co. Kerry

On the south-facing slopes of Killelane Mountain in south-west Kerry, partially swallowed by gorse and bracken, lie the remains of an old field system that most walkers would pass without a second glance.

What makes it quietly notable is the sheer extent of what survives: intermittent stretches of relict field walls spread across an area roughly 325 metres east to west and 300 metres north to south, their outlines both straight and curving, suggesting a landscape that was once carefully divided and worked before being abandoned to rough grazing.

The walls themselves are modest in scale, reaching no more than 0.8 metres thick and 0.6 metres high at their tallest surviving points, but their arrangement tells of sustained agricultural effort at some earlier period. Relict field systems of this kind, sometimes associated with pre-Famine cultivation or with much earlier land use, are found across the upland margins of Kerry, where thin soils and dry exposures once made grazing and small-scale tillage viable before population collapse and land clearance rendered them redundant. Here, the southern and western edges of the system are defined by linear townland boundaries, suggesting that the broader administrative division of the land has outlasted the working of it. The site looks out across Dolus Bay towards Valentia Island, a view that has changed rather less than the land immediately underfoot.

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Pete F
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