That a boundary between fields should be considered archaeologically significant is not as surprising as it sounds. On islands like this, where communities lived close to the margins of what the land and sea could provide, the way people organised agricultural space tells us a great deal about how they lived, and how long they persisted.

Inis Gé Thuaidh, the northernmost of the two Inishkea islands, sits off the Mullet Peninsula in Erris, one of the more remote stretches of the western seaboard. The islands were permanently inhabited until 1934, when the remaining community was evacuated to the mainland following a tragedy in which ten young men from the islands drowned during a sudden storm. Before that, the population had farmed and fished for generations, and the physical marks of that occupation remain on the ground: walls, lazy beds, the outlines of structures. A field boundary of the kind recorded here would have been a working feature of that landscape, built to contain livestock or define the limits of cultivated ground, likely constructed from the stone that is everywhere available on the island's surface.