Field boundary, Gortnagrelly, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field boundary, Gortnagrelly, Co. Sligo

At Gortnagrelly in County Sligo, two small fields survive in a state of quiet collapse, their enclosing walls of rubble sandstone tumbled low but still legible in the landscape.

What makes them worth pausing over is less any dramatic history than the ordinariness of what they represent: the residue of post-medieval farming, the kind of everyday agricultural infrastructure that once covered much of rural Ireland and has since largely vanished back into the ground.

The first field is roughly D-shaped, measuring approximately 17 metres north to south and 15 metres east to west, with its western side running in a straight north-south line. The wall that encloses it is built from local sandstone and has slumped over time to between 0.1 and 0.5 metres in height, spread across a width of up to 2.5 metres in places. Fourteen metres to the south lies a second field, the two separated by a five-metre band of sandstone scree orientated along the same north-south axis. The interiors of both fields are irregularly uneven underfoot. Both appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1837 and 1913, which places them firmly within the post-medieval period, though there is nothing to suggest they are particularly ancient even by those relatively modest standards. Drystone construction, where stones are stacked without mortar and shaped to fit the local geology, was the practical default across much of the west of Ireland, and sandstone scree of the kind visible here would have provided ready building material.

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