Field boundary, Tilickafinna, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Tilickafinna, Co. Cork

On the north-facing slopes of Dursey Island, off the tip of the Beara Peninsula, turf-cutting has gradually stripped back the bog to reveal something older underneath: a series of collapsed stone field boundaries that nobody built for the bog, but which the bog quietly buried.

Running roughly west-northwest to east-southeast for around 130 metres, from a clifftop down along a heather-covered hillside, these low relict walls sit directly on the mineral soil beneath the cutaway, suggesting they predate the growth of the peat above them by a considerable margin.

The walls themselves are modest in their surviving dimensions, roughly 0.6 metres thick and 0.3 metres high, but their extent across the hillside implies a landscape that was once divided, managed, and farmed in ways that left no other obvious trace. What makes the site quietly strange is what happened to the stones in the interim: at various points along the old boundaries, somebody gathered the tumbled material and rearranged it into rectangular turf stands, the low rectangular structures used for stacking cut sod to dry. This recycling of one era's field walls into another era's fuel-drying infrastructure is now itself a relic, since the turf stands are described as abandoned. The stones have thus served two distinct agricultural purposes across an unknown span of time, and now serve neither.

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