Field boundary, Mangerton, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Mangerton, Co. Kerry

On the south-facing slope of Mangerton Mountain in County Kerry, a drystone wall emerges from the bog, runs for roughly 190 metres, and then disappears back into it again.

The wall is low, barely 35 centimetres high in places, and only about half a metre thick, its stones long since collapsed and scattered along both sides. Yet the geometry is deliberate and precise: at around the halfway point, a second wall branches off at a right angle, running eastward for approximately 120 metres until it meets a stream. Someone, at some point, was organising this hillside.

Drystone walls of this kind, built without mortar by stacking and wedging stones against one another, were the ordinary infrastructure of upland farming across Ireland for centuries, used to divide pasture, keep livestock in check, and mark the boundaries of worked land. What makes this particular example quietly striking is how much of it the bog has swallowed. The wall surfaces at the northern end, asserts itself across the rough hill pasture overlooking the Owbeg River valley, then sinks again at the southern end, as though the land reclaimed it gradually while no one was watching. A few upright stones, set at right angles to the line of the wall, survive here and there, a detail that suggests deliberate construction technique rather than casual piling. About 22 metres to the south lies a recorded hut site, and the proximity of the two features hints at a small, self-contained agricultural landscape, a patch of organised life on a mountain that has otherwise gone back to bog.

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Pete F
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