Field boundary, Uragh, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Uragh, Co. Kerry

On a northeast-facing slope above Lough Inchiquin in south-west Kerry, a field boundary has been slowly disappearing into the bog for long enough that only its basal stones still break the surface, partly grassed over and easy to mistake for a natural feature of the hillside.

What remains is a collapsed drystone wall, the kind built without mortar by fitting stones together by weight and friction alone, that meanders roughly north to south for around 128 metres. At about 88 metres from its northern end, a second section branches away to the northeast for a further 46 metres, forming an irregular junction that suggests this was once a working division of land, probably enclosing rough hill pasture rather than anything intensively farmed.

The wall itself is modest in its surviving dimensions, around 0.8 metres thick and 0.7 metres high where it can still be measured, but its setting gives it a quiet significance. Three cairns, stone mounds whose precise origins and purposes are not recorded here in detail, sit in close proximity: two lie 15 and 25 metres to the west of the longer wall section, and a third sits only 4 metres to the east of it. Whether the boundary was laid out in relation to these cairns, or whether the cairns predate the wall by centuries, the clustering is suggestive. In many parts of upland Ireland, field systems and funerary or ceremonial monuments occupy the same ground across very different periods, each generation making use of a landscape already marked by earlier ones.

The bog has done what bogs do, preserving the lower courses while pulling the upper stones gradually out of alignment. The wall no longer encloses anything in any practical sense, but its meandering line across the slope, visible if you know to look for it, is still legible as a human decision about where one piece of ground ended and another began.

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