Field system, Cloon, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Cloon, Co. Kerry

On a hillslope in the Cloon townland of County Kerry, a landscape that looks at first like unbroken boggy moorland turns out, on closer inspection, to be a palimpsest of human organisation.

Spread across roughly half a square kilometre between a townland boundary to the north, Coom Lough to the north-east, and a stream running south towards Lough Reagh, there is a system of relict field walls so low and so thoroughly absorbed by the terrain that they are easy to miss entirely. Many measure only twenty to forty centimetres in height and between thirty and sixty centimetres across. In the wetter parts of the hillslope, they disappear altogether beneath blanket peat, the thick, waterlogged accumulation of decomposed vegetation that has been slowly swallowing the evidence of earlier land use for centuries.

At the centre of the system is a cashel, a type of early medieval stone enclosure typically used as a farmstead or defended homestead, and its relationship to the surrounding walls is unusually legible. At least two of the relict walls radiate outward from either side of the cashel's northern entrance, as though the enclosure itself was the organisational hub from which the wider field network grew. A further wall appears to emerge from the cashel's southern side, connecting to another length of walling that runs partly beneath the peat. The picture that emerges is not of isolated features but of an integrated agricultural landscape, one in which enclosure, access, and land division were all working together. Beyond the cashel, at least four additional hut sites are distributed across the field system, three of them directly abutting the relict walls, suggesting a settlement of some scale and internal complexity, now largely buried and silent beneath the bog.

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Pete F
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