Field system, Cahersiveen, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ritual/Ceremonial
On the north-facing slopes of Bentee, above the town of Cahersiveen and with Valencia Harbour stretched out below, a set of ancient field walls quietly emerges from the surface of a shallow bog.
They are easy to miss, half-swallowed by rough hill grazing land, but once noticed they suggest something more deliberate: a working landscape, carefully divided, now abandoned and slowly sinking.
The remains consist of a roughly rectangular area measuring around 130 metres along its northwest to southeast axis and about 70 metres across. The walls themselves, surviving to a thickness of roughly 0.6 metres and a height of up to 0.7 metres, are built from upright stone slabs set mostly at right angles to the line of the wall, with gaps of varying widths between them. This technique, sometimes called orthostatic walling, gives the structure a comb-like profile rather than the solid mass of later dry-stone construction. Some stretches are straight and linear; others curve, following the logic of the terrain or of some earlier boundary now lost. Several gaps interrupt the walls, whether original entrances or later breaks it is difficult to say. In the northwestern portion of the field system there is also a hut site, a small structure that hints at habitation rather than purely seasonal use. O'Sullivan and Sheehan, who catalogued the site in their 1996 inventory of south-west Kerry, recorded it as number 1175 in their survey of the region.
The bog that now covers the lower portions of the walls has effectively preserved them, holding the slabs in place while the surrounding landscape changed around them. What survives is not a monument in any formal sense, but the ordinary infrastructure of farming life at some earlier period, its date unspecified in the available record, left readable in stone on a hillside that still looks down over the same harbour it always did.