Field system, Kilquire, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Kilquire, Co. Mayo

Beneath the present-day pasture at Kilquire in County Mayo, a network of field boundaries once divided the land into a series of subrectangular plots covering roughly 10,000 square metres.

The system is largely invisible to anyone walking the ground today, but aerial photographs taken in 1970 as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography captured it clearly, the low earthen banks casting just enough shadow to reveal the geometry of an older agricultural landscape beneath the modern one.

The field system was not alone. Two enclosures were folded into its layout, and on its eastern edge it incorporated a cashel, a type of stone-walled enclosure associated with early medieval settlement and farming in Ireland, typically built to protect a homestead and its livestock. This clustering of features suggests the area was once a reasonably organised working landscape, with boundaries, enclosures, and a defended or defined domestic space all functioning together. Land reclamation work has since levelled much of it, including the two enclosures, though isolated stretches of the earthen banks survive at the northern end and at the east where the cashel stands. The date of the field system has not been precisely established, but cashels in Ireland are broadly associated with the early medieval period, roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries, and the integration of the cashel into the boundary layout suggests at least some shared phase of use between the two.

The surviving portions sit in what is now ordinary farmland, and the cashel at the eastern edge remains the most tangible remnant of what the aerial photographs showed as a considerably more extensive arrangement.

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