Field system, Carrigeenblike, Co. Sligo

The ground here is karst, a type of landscape formed where soluble limestone has been slowly dissolved by rainwater over millennia, leaving behind a fractured, rubble-strewn surface that looks almost deliberately chaotic. The difficulty is that the raw material of the walls and the raw material of the hillside are essentially the same thing: naturally occurring rubble limestone and exposed outcrops cover the entire area, so distinguishing what was placed by human hands from what simply fell there requires a careful eye and, ideally, a detailed survey that has not yet been carried out.

What can be said is that lengths of walling are visible in places, and that taken together they suggest the remnants of a field system, a parcelling out of land for agricultural or pastoral use that may stretch back to prehistory. Confirming the full extent and layout of the system would require methodical topographic work, since the ground conditions make it impossible to trace the overall pattern from surface observation alone. One feature within the field system offers a firmer point of reference: a mound-barrow, a burial monument consisting of an earthen or stone mound raised over one or more interments, sits within the bounds of the old enclosures. Barrows of this kind are generally associated with Bronze Age funerary practice, and their presence within or beside field systems is not uncommon in the Irish landscape, where the living and the dead often shared the same worked ground.

The terrace sits to the west of the lake, and the karst pasture that surrounds the walls gives the place an open, windswept quality. The walls themselves are low enough that they can be difficult to distinguish from natural stone runs, particularly in poor light, but where they do resolve into recognisable lines they trace a quiet geometry across the hillside, partial and unresolved, waiting on the survey that would finally make sense of them.