Field boundary, Derrylicka, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ritual/Ceremonial
On a south-facing slope above the valley of the Kealduff River in south-west Kerry, a system of ancient stone walls emerges fitfully from the blanket bog, as though the land itself is only half-willing to give them up.
The walls are curvilinear rather than the straight-edged boundaries of more recent agricultural practice, and they protrude just far enough above the bog surface to trace the outline of what was once a working landscape. Where the ground deepens, the stones disappear entirely beneath the peat, leaving gaps that hint at how much more may still be submerged.
The surviving boundaries cover a roughly rectangular area of approximately 330 metres north to south and 195 metres east to west, the individual walls standing to about half a metre in thickness and reaching some 0.4 metres in height. What makes the site more than a simple field system is what lies within it: three separate hut sites and an enclosure are recorded inside the network of walls. Together, these suggest a settled agricultural community that once farmed this hillside, dividing the ground into managed plots and living within them, before the bog gradually advanced and covered the whole arrangement. Blanket bog, which forms in wet upland conditions over centuries of accumulated plant matter, is a slow but thorough archivist; it preserves what it buries, which is why these walls survive at all.
The site sits in rough hill pasture in the townland of Derrylicka, and because much of it remains beneath the bog, what a visitor sees on the ground is necessarily incomplete. The walls appear intermittently, their curves suggesting organisation and purpose rather than natural stone scatter. Looking downslope toward the Kealduff River valley while standing among them, it is possible to understand why someone once chose this particular hillside to farm.