Field system, Carrownaboll, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Ritual/Ceremonial
At Carrownaboll in County Sligo, there is a field system that exists almost entirely in the past tense.
Spread across roughly twenty acres of south-facing pasture, the network of low earth and stone banks that once divided this land into irregular fields has been levelled so thoroughly that nothing remains visible at ground level. What was real enough to be recorded as active field boundaries on the 1913 Ordnance Survey six-inch map has since been absorbed back into the grass.
The field system, when it still stood, would have been modest in scale: banks averaging about two metres wide and half a metre high, enclosing a patchwork of irregularly shaped fields ranging from a quarter of an acre to three acres. That variation in field size suggests a working agricultural landscape rather than anything formally planned, the kind of incremental boundary-making that accumulates over generations. The survival of the layout on the 1913 OS map confirms the system was still legible into the early twentieth century, which makes its subsequent disappearance a relatively recent event. Aerial photography has proven more revealing than the ground itself, with the ghost of the old boundaries still readable from above in the right conditions, where crop marks or soil differences retain a faint memory of the banks beneath.