Field system, Caherlehillan, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ritual/Ceremonial
On the northern side of the Ferta River valley in south-west Kerry, a stretch of boggy pasture conceals something far older than the rough grazing it now supports.
Walls of upright stone slabs push up through the surface of the bog across an area roughly 1.2 kilometres east to west and 500 metres north to south, tracing the boundaries of a field system that was only formally identified and recorded by Harte in 2002. The walls, averaging just under a metre in thickness and similar in height, are largely overgrown and collapsed, but their lines, both straight and curvilinear, remain legible against the peat. In places the builders incorporated natural outcropping rock into the fabric of the walls; in others, a peaty core is held in place by stone facing on either side. The fields themselves vary in shape and size, though wedge-shaped plots appear most frequently.
What makes this landscape particularly arresting is not the field system alone but the density of human activity it contains. Within its boundaries sit two wedge tombs, a monument type associated with prehistoric farming communities, typically dating to the later Neolithic or early Bronze Age. There is also a cashel, a type of stone-walled circular enclosure used for settlement and livestock in the early medieval period, along with eight hut sites, a children's burial ground, a cross-inscribed stone, and a shrine. The children's burial ground belongs to a tradition known in Irish as a cillín, an unconsecrated burial place typically used for unbaptised infants, found across Ireland from medieval times into the twentieth century. The co-existence here of prehistoric tombs, early medieval enclosures, and later religious markers suggests that this valley was not simply farmed once and abandoned, but returned to and reinterpreted across many centuries, each generation leaving its own imprint on a landscape already marked by those who came before.