Field system, Glanmane, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Glanmane, Co. Kerry

On a steep east-facing slope above Glanmane, a grid of old field boundaries runs across the hillside as if someone simply walked away and never came back.

The boundaries are relict, meaning they were once actively maintained but have long since been abandoned to heather, exposed rock, and thin peat. Sheep graze there now, indifferent to the geometry beneath them, and from the higher ground the view opens north all the way to Tralee Bay.

The field system covers an area roughly 200 metres by 200 metres, spreading down the slope near the entrance to a north-south valley. At least two east-west fields can be traced, extending from close to the valley's upper edge down toward better agricultural land along the stream at the bottom. Within these boundaries sit a number of hut sites and enclosures, and a single clochán, a type of dry-stone corbelled building associated with early medieval or later pastoral settlement in Ireland, built without mortar and roofed by progressively overlapping stones. The whole ensemble suggests a community that once worked this unforgiving terrain in a serious and organised way, defining land, sheltering people or animals, and farming ground that would today be considered marginal at best. How long the site was in use, and precisely when it fell out of use, remains unclear, but the survival of the boundaries and structures in this form points to a place that has seen little disturbance since it was last occupied.

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Pete F
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