Field system, Tullycommon, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Tullycommon, Co. Clare

On a low ridge in Tullycommon, Co. Clare, the land tells several stories at once, and they overlap in ways that are difficult to unpick.

Aerial photography from the 2010s reveals a field system stretching roughly 550 metres on its longer axis, made up of irregular boundaries that do not sit neatly in any single historical moment. Beneath and beside them, the outlines of earlier enclosures are visible, pressed into the ground like layers of handwriting on a palimpsest. This kind of superimposition, where field boundaries and enclosures of different dates accumulate on top of one another, is a reminder that the Irish landscape was rarely remade from scratch; it was amended, reused, and quietly argued over across generations.

The field system sits alongside two other substantial features. One is a cashel, a type of stone-walled ringfort typically associated with early medieval settlement, which contains the traces of several houses shown as roofed on the Ordnance Survey's first edition six-inch map, produced in the nineteenth century. The fact that those structures were still standing and apparently in use at the time of that survey gives the site an unexpected continuity, stretching from early medieval occupation into the relatively recent past. The other is a concentric enclosure, a form defined by multiple roughly circular walls set one inside the other, and associated with it is a fulacht fia, an ancient cooking site of a kind found widely across Ireland, typically consisting of a trough and a mound of heat-shattered stone left over from the process of boiling water using fire-heated rocks. That this particular fulacht fia is clustered so closely with the enclosure and the field system suggests the ridge at Tullycommon drew repeated human attention over a very long span of time, though precisely how those different elements relate to one another in sequence remains an open question.

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