Mound, Coill Bhaile Uí Fhlaithimh, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Mound, Coill Bhaile Uí Fhlaithimh, Co. Kerry

On the lower southern slopes of the Owencashla river valley in County Kerry, a small flat-topped mound sits quietly absorbed into the landscape, so thoroughly assimilated into an old field boundary that it could easily be dismissed as a natural rise or a collapsed wall.

It is neither. Roughly circular in plan, composed mostly of stone with some clay mixed through, and measuring about 7.1 metres by 6.2 metres at its base, it rises to a maximum height of around one metre. A tree grows at its north-western edge, and much of the western sector has been disturbed at some point, perhaps when the surrounding land was last actively farmed.

What makes it quietly puzzling is precisely this absorption into the agricultural fabric of the place. The mound has been incorporated into what appears to be a disused field boundary, marked partly by a low scarp and partly by a line of tree stumps, as though whoever was working this land centuries ago simply built around it, or folded it into their own divisions of the ground without ceremony. Whether the mound originally served a funerary purpose, a ritual one, or something else entirely is not recorded. Its composition, stone with clay intermingled and a grass cover now reclaiming it, offers few immediate clues. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a thorough regional inventory that brought a great many such quietly anomalous features into the record for the first time.

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Pete F
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