Field boundary, Lecarrow, Co. Mayo

Near Lecarrow, close to the north-west-facing sea cliffs, a stretch of old wall no more than eight metres long emerges from the grass, running downslope beside a small stream. It is easy to walk past without a second glance, yet it belongs to a pattern of buried field boundaries that surface across this wind-exposed terrain of steep hills and ridges, visible either as low protrusions through the grassy sward or as cross-sections exposed in shallow peat cuttings.

The wall is part of a broader network of old boundaries recorded across this part of the island. Several comparable stretches were identified in the same general area, sharing similar character and orientation, suggesting they once formed a coherent system of land division rather than isolated, incidental constructions. The peat cuttings that reveal them are a reminder of how much Clare Island's landscape has changed over centuries, with accumulated peat quietly burying earlier arrangements of fields and enclosures. The archaeology of the island was examined in depth as part of the Clare Island Survey, a long-running research project whose fifth volume, edited by Paul Gosling, Conleth Manning, and John Waddell and published by the Royal Irish Academy in 2007, brought together detailed documentation of sites like this one, small and fragmentary but collectively significant.