Field system, Bottomstown, Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Bottomstown, Co. Limerick

A field that looks, from ground level, like ordinary rough pasture in County Limerick turns out to be something considerably older once you get above it.

The boundaries have long since vanished from the surface, yet the outlines of a rectilinear field system, stretching roughly 335 metres north to south and 170 metres east to west, persist invisibly beneath the soil, legible only when crops or grasses respond differently to what lies underneath. These are cropmarks, a phenomenon where buried features such as ditches or banks affect how vegetation grows above them, producing patterns of differing colour or height that become visible from the air, particularly in dry summers when contrasts sharpen.

The site at Bottomstown was first identified during the Bruff aerial photographic survey in 1986, catalogued as Bruff 96. At that point it was not marked on any Ordnance Survey historic maps, though the 1840 edition of the OSi six-inch map does depict relic field boundaries running east to west across the area, suggesting the system was already in slow decline by the mid-nineteenth century. A further oblique aerial photograph taken on 5 January 2003 by the Archaeological Survey of Ireland showed what appeared to be a series of rectilinear enclosures, interpreted as possible sub-divisions of a narrow field. Later satellite imagery, including a Digital Globe orthoimage taken between 2011 and 2013 and a Google Earth image from March 2018, confirmed the cropmarks more clearly, with some boundaries running perpendicular to one another in a rough grid. The field system lies immediately north of a separate recorded enclosure and contains a relic watercourse that runs north to south before curving westward through the south-western quadrant, a detail that hints at how the land may once have been managed or drained.

Because this site is visible only from above, the practical experience of visiting is necessarily indirect. The cropmarks are most legible through aerial imagery platforms such as Google Earth, where the March 2018 orthoimage shows the layout with some clarity. On the ground, the area is rough pasture and offers no obvious surface trace of the buried boundaries. Researchers or curious visitors interested in seeing the form of the field system are best served by consulting the aerial record compiled through the Bruff survey and the ASI photographic archive rather than expecting anything visible underfoot.

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Pete F
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