On the lower southern slopes of Red Hill in Carrowculleen, County Sligo, a network of small, irregularly-shaped fields once covered the pasture land, their boundaries forming a pattern legible enough to be mapped in 1913 and later captured in aerial photography. By 1994, when someone went to look for them on the ground, they were gone entirely, levelled in the course of land reclamation.

What makes this site quietly arresting is the gap between its documentary record and its physical absence. The 1913 Ordnance Survey map preserves the outline of a field system that had presumably existed for some considerable time before that edition was drawn, the irregular shapes suggesting incremental, organic division of land rather than any planned enclosure. An aerial photograph, catalogued as ACP V 203/141-2 (Roll 127, pr. 14), added a further layer of evidence, the kind of overhead view that often reveals earthworks invisible at ground level. But when an inspection was carried out in 1994, the boundaries had been wiped away. Land reclamation, the process of improving ground for agricultural use, typically by drainage, levelling, or reseeding, had removed whatever earthen banks, ditches, or stone lines had once marked these divisions.

The site now offers nothing to see, which is itself a kind of record. What survives is purely cartographic and photographic, a field system preserved in archive rather than in earth.