Field system, Aillwee, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Aillwee, Co. Clare

On a steep-sided ridge near Aillwee in County Clare, a present-day townland boundary takes an unexplained angular kink, and the reason for that kink has been lying in plain sight for centuries.

A drystone field wall, now tumbled but still standing up to 1.6 metres in places, runs in a concentric arc around an ancient cashel before bending sharply and continuing in a different direction. The wall and the boundary line are, in effect, the same thing, and the suspicion is that the boundary itself may have been laid along an even older demarcation, one whose origins predate any map or record we have of this landscape.

A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common across early medieval Ireland, and this one sits on a narrow level terrace on the western face of the ridge, surrounded by rough and overgrown rock outcrop. The field system that radiates from it is understood to be of multiperiod origin, meaning its various walls were not all built at the same time or necessarily for the same purpose. One tumbled wall runs outward from the south-east of the cashel and connects to a second, longer wall that sweeps around it in a broad concentric line before changing angle. Further to the east and south-east, more irregular stonewalls meander across the slope, forming small, oddly shaped enclosures and pointing toward what may be another enclosed site roughly sixty metres south-east of the cashel. The whole arrangement, walls folding into boundaries folding into older boundaries, suggests a landscape that was being organised, reorganised, and then gradually abandoned across a very long span of time.

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Pete F
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