Field system, Brees, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Brees, Co. Mayo

In a gently rolling pasture in County Mayo, the ghost of a working farm survives as a series of low, grass-covered ridges and collapsed drystone walls.

The pattern is rectilinear, a rough grid of fields covering an area of roughly 200 metres north to south and 170 metres east to west. At least four individual fields can still be traced, each running up to around 45 to 50 metres across, with the faint corrugations of old cultivation ridges still visible inside them, running on a roughly north-east to south-west axis. Drystone walling, a technique of stacking unmortered stone without binding material, forms the boundaries, though the walls themselves have long since slumped and been absorbed into the turf.

The field system sits close to Brees Castle, an Anglo-Norman masonry fortification that occupies a prominent knoll towards the south-eastern edge of the area. The proximity raises an obvious question about date, and the possibility that some of the field walls are medieval cannot be entirely ruled out. The more likely explanation, however, is more recent. A farmstead stood approximately 30 metres north of the castle, and it appears on both the 1838 and 1920 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, placing the working life of the fields firmly in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. The castle, then, would have been a decaying landmark on the edge of a functioning agricultural holding, the two features separated by several centuries of history but sharing the same patch of ground.

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Pete F
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