Field boundary, Bunnamohaun, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Bunnamohaun, Co. Mayo

On the southern flank of Knockmore, on Clare Island off the Mayo coast, a length of drystone wall runs for roughly 150 metres across a steep mountain slope before quietly disappearing into the ground.

It follows a NW to SE axis, straddling a stream, and at its lower end it does not so much finish as dissolve into a loose scatter of stone on the bank of what is now a dry channel. The stream itself has since migrated, cutting a newer course slightly to the west, leaving the wall's terminal point marooned beside an old watercourse that no longer carries water.

Drystone walling of this kind, built without mortar by stacking and wedging stones together, was the standard method of marking field boundaries across the west of Ireland for centuries, often representing the accumulated effort of many generations working the same ground. What survives here is a ruined remnant, the wall reduced in most places to a low, uneven ridge, its maximum height around half a metre and its width roughly 1.4 metres. The stones are bleached and thickly covered in lichen, and several gaps break its line. Towards its upper reaches the wall becomes increasingly buried under sward, the turf slowly reclaiming it until the structure simply peters out without any clear terminus. The combination of the abandoned dry channel below and the vanishing line above gives the whole feature an air of gradual erasure, as though the landscape has been steadily absorbing it from both ends. The wall is recorded in the New Survey of Clare Island, an archaeological survey of the island edited by Paul Gosling, Conleth Manning, and John Waddell and published by the Royal Irish Academy in 2007.

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