Field system, Dromickbane, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Dromickbane, Co. Kerry

Beneath a tangle of ferns and gorse on a north-facing slope in County Kerry, a set of stone walls is slowly losing its argument with the bog.

The walls, averaging about 65 centimetres thick and reaching up to 90 centimetres high in places, protrude only intermittently above the surface of the shallow peat, their collapsed remains hinting at a field system that once covered a roughly rectangular area approximately 600 metres along its north-east to south-west axis and around 240 metres across. The varying shapes and sizes of the fields that can still be traced suggest not a single planned enclosure but something that grew over time, adjusted and reworked by whoever lived and farmed here.

The site sits within an area of cutaway bog, land from which peat has been extracted at some point, which is what allows the buried stonework to break the surface at all. Three hut sites are recorded within the field system, indicating that this was not simply a pastoral enclosure but a place where people actually lived, most likely farming the surrounding plots. The field system does not announce a precise date for itself, but aerial photographs taken in 1973 captured the layout clearly enough to allow the pattern of walls to be mapped, preserving a record of something that is otherwise difficult to read at ground level, where overgrowth and collapse make the full extent easy to miss.

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Pete F
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