Field boundary, Lehid, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Lehid, Co. Kerry

On a north-east-facing slope above Gowlane Lake in south-west Kerry, a low line of stones pushes up through the blanket bog like a submerged spine.

It is easy to miss, and that is partly the point. What survives here is approximately seventy metres of a collapsed field wall, its lower course stones still in rough alignment, its upper courses long since tumbled and scattered downslope to the north-east. The bog has done most of the work of preservation, holding the base in place while the rest slid away.

The wall runs in a north-westerly direction from the edge of the Drombohilly-Lauragh road and connects, at its far end, with the outer face of a separate enclosure. It also forms part of a second enclosure and is associated with a nearby hut site, suggesting that what looks like an isolated fragment is actually a remnant of a more complete agricultural landscape, one in which fields, enclosures, and a dwelling were once organised in relation to one another. The wall itself is modest in its dimensions, roughly sixty-five centimetres wide and sixty centimetres high where it survives, but those measurements speak to a structure that was built with some intention, not simply a casual clearance pile. Relict field walls of this kind, preserved beneath blanket bog, are among the quieter forms of archaeological evidence in the Irish landscape. The bog accumulates slowly over centuries and can seal earlier land use beneath it, so that what appears to be featureless rough pasture occasionally turns out to rest on top of something far older.

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Pete F
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