Field system, Milltown, Co. Roscommon
Co. Roscommon |
Ritual/Ceremonial
Beneath the reclaimed pasture outside Milltown in County Roscommon, a carefully organised agricultural landscape lies entirely out of sight.
What was once a field system of rectangular plots, each measuring roughly 100 metres by 50 metres and covering a total area of around 10 hectares, has been absorbed so completely into later farming improvements that nothing of it remains visible at ground level. The land gives no hint of what it once contained.
The system comprised not only those regular rectangular fields but also a associated rectangular enclosure and a pitfield, a term referring to a small plot, often sunken or embanked, that was typically used for cultivation or processing. All three elements formed an integrated complex, suggesting a planned and deliberate use of the land rather than piecemeal agricultural activity. The level terrain here would have made it well suited to that kind of organised layout. Precisely when the system was in use is not recorded, but such field arrangements are frequently associated with earlier periods of intensive land management, later erased by the drainage schemes and land reclamation that reshaped so much of the Irish midlands and west during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.