Field boundary, Letter, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Letter, Co. Kerry

On the eastern slope of Boughil mountain in south Kerry, the bog has been slowly swallowing a landscape that was once divided, managed, and lived in.

What protrudes today, just a few centimetres to perhaps seventy centimetres above the present bog surface, is the remnant of up to forty stretches of walling, some straight, some curved, spreading across an area roughly a hundred metres east to west and seventy metres north to south. These are pre-bog walls, meaning they predate the formation of the blanket bog that now covers them, and their survival is entirely owed to that same peat, which sealed them in place while the world above moved on. The walls average around twenty metres in length and run both across and along the mountain slope, suggesting a working agricultural landscape rather than any single monument.

Scattered among the field boundaries are small subcircular enclosures, roughly five metres across, some ringed by shallow ditches. These may have served as fionnán enclosures, pens used to manage the coarse mountain grass known as fionnán, likely for grazing purposes. At the western end of the complex sits a fulacht fiadh, a type of prehistoric cooking site found widely across Ireland, typically identified by a mound of fire-shattered stone and blackened earth surrounding a trough or depression. This one is crescentic in shape, roughly nine metres north to south and seven metres east to west, with a central depression measuring around two metres by one and a half metres. The mound is open to the west. The material it is composed of, burnt stone and charred soil, is the accumulated residue of repeated heating, almost certainly involving water brought to the boil by dropping hot stones into a trough. Together, the walls, enclosures, and fulacht fiadh describe a community that farmed, cooked, and organised space on this hillside long before the bog claimed it, overlooking what is now the valley of the Finnihy river to the south-east.

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