Field system, Ballydoora, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ritual/Ceremonial
Spreading across roughly two kilometres of the Burren's exposed limestone plateau, an ancient field system near Ballydoora in County Clare preserves boundaries that most of the surrounding landscape has long since lost.
While neighbouring fields have been reclaimed and smoothed into modern agricultural use, this irregular patchwork of enclosures survives, visible in aerial photography from the early 2010s only intermittently, surfacing and vanishing through the dense scrub that colonises the karst. The karst here, bare limestone pavement fissured by millennia of rainfall, is itself part of why anything survives at all: the ground resists deep ploughing in ways that softer soils do not.
The field system extends from Caherconnell in the south-west to Eantybeg North in the north-east, a span of approximately two kilometres, and is associated with eleven cashels, including Caherconnell itself and Caherlissaniska. A cashel is a type of stone-walled ringfort, typically early medieval in date, and the concentration of eleven within a single field system suggests a landscape that was intensively organised and inhabited over a long period. But the chronology here may be considerably deeper than the early medieval period alone. A Bronze Age house has been recorded close to Caherconnell, a megalithic structure lies within Eantybeg North, and two unclassified cairns, one in Eantybeg North and one in Eantybeg South, point to activity stretching back into prehistory. Whether specific boundary walls are prehistoric in origin is not established, but the proximity of these monuments raises the possibility that some of what looks like medieval field organisation may overlie or incorporate something older.
The site is not a managed heritage attraction, and the scrub cover and irregular terrain make much of it difficult to read on the ground. The aerial record remains the clearest way to appreciate its full extent, but visitors to the nearby Caherconnell Stone Fort, which is open to the public, can at least stand within one of the cashels that anchor the south-western end of the system and get a sense of the wider landscape it once organised.