Field system, Carrownabinna, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Ritual/Ceremonial
On a gently westward-tilting slope in County Sligo, a triangular parcel of ground holds the ghost of an ancient field system, quiet enough that most people walking past would not give it a second glance.
What marks it out is the geometry: a low, broad earthen bank runs along the south-eastern side, roughly thirty metres long, nearly six metres wide, and only a quarter of a metre high, while two field boundaries meet at right angles along the north-western and north-eastern edges to complete the triangle. The whole enclosed area measures approximately twenty-four metres north to south and twenty-one metres east to west, which is modest by any standard, yet the deliberateness of the layout is hard to dismiss.
Field systems of this kind are among the more quietly puzzling features of the Irish landscape. They represent organised land use, the parcelling out of ground for agriculture or livestock management, but without additional excavation it is difficult to say when this particular enclosure was made or what it was used for. The north-eastern boundary has been removed at some point, though its line remains faintly legible at ground level, a crease in the turf that the land has not quite forgotten. There is no trace of a fosse, the ditch that often accompanies earthen banks as both a source of material and a functional boundary, and the original entrance into the enclosure can no longer be identified. What remains is the bare structural logic of the thing, shorn of the details that would tell its fuller story.