Field system, Carrowhubbuck, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Carrowhubbuck, Co. Sligo

At the edge of the Atlantic coastline in Carrowhubbuck, County Sligo, a cluster of abandoned small fields occupies one of the more unlikely parcels of ground imaginable.

Wedged between the foot of a hillock and the sheer drop of a cliff edge, the remains of a series of enclosures survive as low banks of earth and stone, the kind of feature that is easily walked past without recognition. What makes the arrangement quietly compelling is less any individual element than the overall picture: generations of people once thought it worthwhile to divide and work this marginal, wind-exposed strip of ground.

The field system sits approximately thirty metres north of a cliff-edge fort, a type of promontory enclosure in which natural coastal features, here the cliff itself, do much of the defensive work. The proximity of the two sites suggests a landscape that was organised and inhabited with some intention, though the precise relationship between the fort and the fields, and the period in which the fields were in use, is not recorded. The northern limit of the complex is marked by a modern field boundary running roughly northwest to southeast, which gives a sense of how later agricultural activity has continued to reshape the same ground, overlaying older patterns without entirely erasing them.

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Pete F
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