Field boundary, Kilbride, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Kilbride, Co. Mayo

Beneath the flat, stripped surface of a cutaway bog near Killaturly Lough in County Mayo, there may be the remains of a field wall that predates the bog itself.

That is the quietly vertiginous idea at the heart of this site: not a ruin you can visit, but a boundary that farming families once walked along, now buried under centuries of peat, in a landscape that has since been industrially stripped back to something approaching its pre-bog surface.

Cutaway bog is what remains after large-scale peat extraction has removed the accumulated layers of a raised or blanket bog, sometimes exposing the older ground surface underneath. It is in that exposed zone, stretching roughly 400 metres toward the lough's northeastern and eastern shores, that a possible pre-bog field wall was reported in 1991, attributed to a personal communication from F. McCann. Pre-bog field systems are known elsewhere in Ireland, most famously at the Céide Fields in north Mayo, where Neolithic farmers built stone-walled enclosures that were subsequently sealed and preserved beneath blanket peat over thousands of years. Whether the Kilbride wall belongs to a similar tradition, or to a later period of settlement, is unknown. No visible trace of it has been confirmed, and its exact location within the bog remains uncertain.

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