Field system, Lackaroe, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Lackaroe, Co. Kerry

On a saddle of ridge running south-east from Curramore Hill in County Kerry, a set of collapsed field walls lies half-swallowed by rough pasture.

The walls are low and tumbled now, most no more than thirty centimetres high and eighty centimetres thick, but together they trace out a system of small, irregularly shaped enclosures extending roughly 130 metres from north-east to south-west and about 80 metres across, sloping gently downhill towards the south-west. What makes the place quietly arresting is not any single dramatic feature but the sheer ordinariness of what it once represented: someone, at some point, divided this hillside into workable parcels of land and built the boundaries by hand, stone by stone, without mortar.

The walls are drystone construction, meaning they rely entirely on the careful placement of stones rather than any binding material, a technique widespread in Ireland from prehistory onwards and well suited to a landscape where loose fieldstone is plentiful. The system is not isolated. In its north-eastern section there is both an enclosure and a cashel, the latter being a type of stone ringfort, a roughly circular enclosure defined by a substantial drystone wall, typically associated with early medieval settlement and farming. Critically, three of the field boundaries run directly up to the cashel wall, and the two features appear to be contemporary with one another. That relationship suggests the fields were not a later addition laid out around a pre-existing monument, but rather part of the same episode of occupation, the cashel and its surrounding land divisions conceived and built together as a working agricultural unit.

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Pete F
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