Field system, Dromroe, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Dromroe, Co. Kerry

Scattered across rough hill pasture and cutaway bog above the valley of the Dromoghty River in south-west Kerry, a series of old drystone walls breaks the surface at irregular intervals, their collapsed remains tracing the ghost of a field system that the surrounding bog has spent centuries slowly swallowing.

The walls protrude intermittently rather than forming a continuous boundary, giving the impression of something half-submerged, as though the landscape is still making up its mind whether to reveal or conceal what lies beneath.

The system covers an area of roughly 300 metres east to west and around 170 metres north to south. What survives of the walls stands to about 0.8 metres in height and measures between 0.5 and 0.8 metres in thickness, substantial enough to suggest they were built with some permanence in mind. Irregular enclosed areas can still be traced throughout, pointing to a pattern of small, oddly shaped fields rather than anything geometrically planned. Drystone construction, which uses no mortar and relies entirely on the careful stacking and interlocking of stones, was the default building method for field boundaries across much of upland Ireland for millennia, and its presence here is not unusual in itself. What is quietly remarkable is the degree to which the bog has preserved the layout at all, locking the collapsed walls in place beneath layers of peat that have accumulated over the centuries as the ground became waterlogged and the land was gradually abandoned to the elements.

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Pete F
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