Field system, Gearhanagoul, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Gearhanagoul, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing slope above the valley of the Coomeelan stream in south-west Kerry, the remains of a working landscape lie half-swallowed by bog.

Collapsed stone walls, roughly a metre thick and still standing about sixty centimetres above the surface where they protrude, trace the outlines of a field system covering an area of approximately 300 metres east to west and 300 metres north to south. The walls are curvilinear rather than the straight-edged grid of later agricultural improvement, and the fields they once defined vary considerably in shape and size. Rubble has tumbled downslope over time, and in places the walls simply disappear into the bog, continuing beneath it as though the landscape swallowed them mid-sentence.

What makes this site quietly arresting is how much activity it once concentrated in a single area of rough hill pasture. Nested within the field system are four enclosures, the kind of defined spaces that would have served any number of pastoral or domestic purposes in early medieval Ireland. There is also a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site typically identified by a mound of burnt and fire-cracked stone, thought to have been used for boiling water in a trough, possibly for cooking, possibly for other communal purposes. Their precise date is often difficult to establish, but fulachtaí fia are generally associated with the Bronze Age, and their presence here alongside the enclosures suggests this hillside was in organised use across a considerable stretch of time. The bog that now obscures sections of the walls is in one sense a record of abandonment, but it has also preserved what survives.

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Pete F
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