Field system, Barntick, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Barntick, Co. Clare

On a rough, unreclaimed slope in County Clare, a set of ancient field boundaries has quietly survived the encroachment of modern housing on one side and the waters of Killone Lake on the other.

The boundaries themselves are not dramatic earthworks demanding attention; they are the kind of feature that rewards a careful eye rather than a casual glance, the skeletal remains of a landscape that was once systematically divided and farmed.

The field system sits on a slight south-east-facing slope at Barntick, roughly 300 metres south of Killone Lake, wedged between that natural boundary and a modern housing development that presses in from the south-east. The boundaries appear to be broadly contemporary with a nearby enclosure, suggesting that whoever laid out these divisions also maintained a defined habitation or agricultural space close by. Critically, this is not an isolated fragment. A second field system, recorded separately to the south-east of the housing development, is thought to have originally formed a single, larger network with this one. The modern estate has effectively bisected what was once a continuous agricultural landscape, leaving two portions stranded on either side. The full extent of that earlier system is now only legible by stitching the two remnants back together in the imagination, something that aerial and satellite imagery, including views captured on Google Earth as recently as January 2020, makes surprisingly possible.

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