Field system, Bigwood, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Bigwood, Co. Westmeath

On the summit of a hill in County Westmeath known locally as the Hill of Mael, a set of low drystone walls meanders across the landscape in a way that sets them apart from almost everything else visible in the surrounding fields.

Where post-medieval field boundaries tend to run in straight, deliberate lines, these walls curve and drift, following no obvious geometry, and that distinction is what makes them significant. Aerial photography taken in November 2011 makes the contrast plain: the older, wandering walls and the later, rational grid of post-1700 enclosures exist almost side by side, representing entirely different ways of organising land across many centuries.

Four drystone field walls have been recorded on and around the hill. Two of them radiate outward from a cashel, a type of early medieval stone ringfort, which itself sits inside what may be a large trivallate hillfort, meaning a hillfort defended by three concentric banks or ditches. The first wall runs roughly south-west to north-east off the north-east face of the cashel and extends some 113 metres. The second runs off the north face and follows a south-east to north-west axis for approximately 190 metres. A third wall, 270 metres long, crosses the west-facing slope of the hill, and a fourth, running 235 metres along a similar alignment, lies roughly 250 metres further to the west. The relationship between the cashel and the field system is not fully resolved, but the meandering character of the walls is consistent with prehistoric agricultural practice, when boundaries were laid out to suit the contours of the land and the immediate needs of those working it, rather than the surveyed geometries that came later.

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