Field system, Reennafardarrig Island, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Reennafardarrig Island, Co. Kerry

Seven acres of Atlantic-exposed ground off the north-east side of Illauntannig, and yet someone once built a home here, divided the land into fields, and perhaps carved a cross into a lump of sandstone.

Reennafardarrig is not the kind of island that announces itself. What remains is a set of nearly vanished traces: an oval hut, a few lines of upright slabs running north and south-east toward the shore, and the suggestion of a life organised around cultivation or grazing on ground that now belongs mostly to wind and grass.

At the centre and highest point of the island, the hut foundation survives as a low grass-grown ring, reduced in most places to a few centimetres above the surface. Internally it measures roughly 3.2 metres east to west and 4.9 metres north to south, with the entrance positioned in the western wall, a common orientation in early Irish vernacular building that offered some shelter from the prevailing weather. A large boulder, about 2.7 metres long, lies close to the west-north-west of the structure and may once have been incorporated into the wall itself. From this central point, the disused field walls extend outward, though they are now little more than interrupted lines of disconnected upright slabs rather than anything resembling a continuous boundary. The Co. Kerry Field Club recorded, in 1942, a small cross and other linear markings on a sandstone boulder somewhere on the island, but a later survey was unable to relocate it, leaving that detail in an uncertain state somewhere between documented fact and lost curiosity.

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Pete F
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