Cultivation ridges, Ballincar, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Cultivation ridges, Ballincar, Co. Sligo

On the north-eastern shore of Sligo Bay, in undulating pasture at the western end of a low ridge, lies a field system that exists now only in a single aerial photograph.

The image captures ridge and furrow cultivation marks running on an east-west axis across an area roughly 240 metres from north to south and 130 metres from east to west, along with the faint traces of fragmentary field boundaries. Ridge and furrow is the characteristic corrugated pattern left by repeated ploughing in the same strips over many seasons, the soil thrown inward to form long raised beds with drainage channels between them. It is a feature associated across Ireland and Britain with medieval and early modern tillage, and in the Irish context often with the labour-intensive spade cultivation known as lazy-bed farming. When the site was inspected on the ground in 2004, nothing remained visible at surface level.

What makes this particular record quietly compelling is the gap between the photographic evidence and the physical reality. The aerial photograph, taken as part of an Ordnance Survey flight series, caught something the ground could no longer show. The cultivation marks and the field boundaries it recorded had, by the time anyone walked the land to verify them, been absorbed entirely back into the pasture. The site covers a meaningful area, large enough to suggest organised, sustained agricultural activity at some point in the past, yet it left no kerb, no ridge, no earthwork that a visitor or a farmer would notice underfoot.

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Pete F
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