Field system, Funshinagh, Co. Roscommon

Co. Roscommon |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Funshinagh, Co. Roscommon

On a gentle north-facing slope at Funshinagh in County Roscommon, a pattern of rectangular fields lies half-buried beneath scrub, its geometry still readable from the air even as it fades from the ground.

The fields, each roughly 50 metres by 30 metres, are laid out in strips running north-west to south-east, and within them are lazy beds, the long, narrow cultivation ridges raised by hand or spade that became ubiquitous across the Irish landscape from the post-medieval period onward, particularly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when potato cultivation drove an intensive reworking of marginal ground. Here, the lazy beds are defined by collapsed stone walls, still around a metre and a half wide though reduced to only about 30 centimetres in height, sitting on shelves of karst, the bare or thinly soiled limestone pavement characteristic of parts of Connacht.

What makes this site quietly puzzling is the absence of any accompanying settlement. The fields once covered around 40 acres, roughly 16 hectares, but that extent has since contracted to about 14 acres, some 5.5 hectares. Whoever worked this ground left no trace of a house or enclosure within the surviving area. The nearest structure, a single house, lies approximately 150 metres to the north on reclaimed land, which may or may not be connected to the agricultural activity that shaped these fields. It is a landscape of effort without an obvious author, the labour of cultivation preserved in low earthworks while the people who made them remain unaccounted for at the site itself.

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Pete F
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