Field system, Shronahiree More, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Shronahiree More, Co. Kerry

Beneath the blanket bog on the lower western slopes of Knockaunanattin, in County Kerry, a lost agricultural landscape lies only barely out of sight.

Up to sixty stretches of ancient walling push through the surface of the peat, most of them protruding no more than about forty centimetres above the ground, yet together they describe a coherent pattern of fields and enclosures that once covered an area of roughly 670 metres by 590 metres. These are pre-bog walls, meaning they were built before the peat grew over them, which places them in a period when this part of the Iveragh Peninsula was open, workable land rather than the wet moorland it is today.

The walls themselves are built from rather large boulders with intermittent upright stones, each stretch up to a metre wide and ranging from ten to sixty metres in length. The layout is not random: a number of long, rectilinear fields can be made out, averaging around fifty metres by fifteen metres, suggesting organised agricultural use rather than casual boundary-marking. Towards the southern end of the complex sit the poorly preserved foundations of a small circular hut, with a maximum internal diameter of 2.8 metres and an entrance gap of 1.1 metres facing south-west. Two further enclosures lie within the wider complex. One, measuring roughly 4.2 metres by 3.6 metres, sits about seventy metres north-east of the Glashawee river, its circular line of boulders interrupted by a narrow entrance to the south. A second, more crudely constructed subcircular enclosure lies some 270 metres to the south-east, with walls averaging nearly a metre thick. Taken together, the hut and enclosures suggest a settlement, however small and seasonal it may have been, rather than just a system for managing livestock or crops.

The bog that now covers this landscape is in one sense its preserving medium. Peat accumulation is slow and can blanket entire field systems over centuries, sealing walls, floors, and sometimes organic material beneath it. The Iveragh Peninsula, surveyed comprehensively by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their 1996 Cork University Press volume, contains numerous such buried or semi-buried remains, and Shronahiree More is one of the more extensive examples documented there. The walls visible today represent only what the peat has not yet swallowed.

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