Where erosion has cut into the dark organic layers that line the shoreline, a fragment of a drystone field wall has emerged, 3.5 metres long, 1.2 metres wide, and 0.6 metres high, built in the dry-stone manner, meaning without mortar, each stone relying on the weight and fit of its neighbours for stability. It is not the wall itself that is particularly arresting, but what its presence implies: that beneath the peat, which accumulates over centuries as waterlogged vegetation compresses and darkens, there are the remnants of a managed, divided landscape that was eventually swallowed by the bog.

This wall does not stand alone. A second wall of the same character lies roughly 10 metres to the east, and a third approximately 40 metres beyond that. Together they suggest a system of field boundaries, the kind of subdivision that would have been used to organise agricultural or pastoral land. Peat growth in the west of Ireland has buried countless such features, preserving them in remarkable condition while simultaneously hiding them from view for generations. The shoreline erosion that exposes them is, in a quiet way, both destructive and revelatory, stripping back the accumulated centuries to show what farming life once looked like in this corner of Mayo before the land became unworkable or was simply abandoned.