Field system, Tuar Sáilín, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Tuar Sáilín, Co. Kerry

At Tuar Sáilín in County Kerry, a peat bog holds the faint outlines of field boundaries that predate the landscape now covering them.

Some of these relic boundaries sit just above the present surface of the bog, barely breaking through, and it was only during monitoring work associated with new forest planting that their full significance became clear. What had initially appeared to be a single enclosure turned out to be part of a larger field system, one that had been quietly preserved beneath the bog for an unknown stretch of time.

The enclosure was first recorded in 2014 by Edmund O'Donovan, and the subsequent monitoring revealed a coherent arrangement of two roughly rectangular fields lying on either side of a modern track. The area they define runs approximately 130 metres from north to south and around 50 metres from east to west. The western boundaries follow the base of a steep natural scarp, using the natural topography as a ready-made edge; in the southwest corner, a further stretch of boundary, about 20 metres long, continues westwards into the existing forestry. On the eastern side, three further boundaries extend outward, and two of them appear to terminate at large natural boulders, suggesting that whoever laid out this system was incorporating prominent features of the ground itself rather than ignoring them. Field systems of this kind, defined by low earthen or stone banks, were commonly used to divide agricultural land and manage livestock, and when a bog later develops over such a landscape, it can preserve these boundaries in a way that drier ground rarely does.

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