Field system, Cahirguillamore, Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Cahirguillamore, Co. Limerick

Beneath the grazing pasture of a County Limerick deer park, a ghost landscape lies just below the surface, invisible at ground level but unmistakable from the air.

The field system at Cahirguillamore does not appear on any Ordnance Survey historic maps, yet it covers at least 65 hectares of ground, spanning both sides of the approach road into the Cahir Guillamore estate and potentially stretching further east into the townland of Rockbarton and south into Ballynanty. Its traces, low earthen banks, cropmarks, and cultivation furrows, belong to no single period and no single plan. This is not the remnant of one settlement but a layered palimpsest of human land use, rewritten repeatedly over centuries.

The serious scholarly study of the site began in the early twentieth century, though curiosity about it predates that. Writing in 1896, Dowd noted that mounds within the demesne had been interpreted locally as the foundations of extensive buildings, with some accounts describing them grandly as the remains of an ancient city of great extent. By 1942, the archaeologists Ó Ríordáin and Hunt had analysed aerial photography of the site and offered a more measured reading. They described a chequerboard pattern of square and oblong fields, bounded variously by straight lines and curves, varying considerably in size. Crucially, they observed that the fields were not all of the same date. The smaller, more irregular enclosures near the eastern margin of their aerial photograph appeared older than the larger fields to the north-west. In some places, cultivation furrows could be seen cutting across the marks of earlier field walls, showing successive phases of agricultural reorganisation. The relationship between the field banks and two nearby earthwork forts added further complexity: banks radiate outward from forts A and B, suggesting those forts were still meaningful landmarks when the surrounding fields were laid out, while a third fort was simply built across, its rampart cut by a later bank without apparent concern. O'Kelly, writing in 1943, placed the whole complex within a wider medieval village and its associated remains, estimating the full extent of the monument cluster at around 500 acres and noting that it incorporated houses, roads, and forts alongside the field system.

The site sits within the private demesne of Cahir Guillamore House, so direct access to the fields themselves is not available to the general visitor. The most productive way to encounter this landscape is through aerial imagery: the field system is best resolved on Ordnance Survey orthoimages taken between 2005 and 2012, Digital Globe images from 2011 to 2013, and a Google Earth orthoimage dated September 2020. A CUCAP oblique aerial photograph taken in July 1968 provided one of the earliest clear views of the earthworks. The 31 recorded monuments incorporated within the system are catalogued under reference numbers LI031-041001 through LI031-041031 in the national record, and the annotated aerial imagery associated with the site offers the clearest sense of how much has survived, quietly, under centuries of grass.

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