Field system, Killeenagh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ritual/Ceremonial
On the lower south-eastern slopes of Knockmore, where rough hill grazing gives way to shallow bog, a set of field walls sits half-submerged and largely unnoticed.
What makes them quietly arresting is the manner of their survival: intermittent upright slabs, set at right angles to the line of the wall, protrude just above the surface of the bog like the teeth of a comb. The overall layout covers a roughly rectangular area of around 190 metres east to west and 130 metres north to south, with both straight and curvilinear stretches suggesting a system that responded to the particular contours of the land rather than any uniform plan. The whole sits with a view across Castlemaine Harbour, though the setting now reads as marginal ground, the kind of terrain that was long ago worked and then quietly relinquished.
Within the field walls there is a hut site, described by Judith Cuppage in her 1986 survey of the Dingle Peninsula. What she recorded there adds an unusual detail to an already unassuming spot: a circular enclosure, roughly 5.2 metres in diameter and a metre high, that appears to have been excavated out of the centre of a natural mound rather than simply built up from the ground. The hollow is drystone-lined, and set into the western side of its interior is a rectangular pit, also drystone-lined, measuring approximately 1.4 by 1.5 metres and half a metre deep. The function of that pit is not recorded. Whether it served as a storage feature, a hearth setting, or something else entirely, the structure as a whole points to a moment when this boggy hillside was genuinely inhabited and organised, its field boundaries marking out a working landscape that the bog has since been slowly reclaiming.