Field system, Clonarney, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Clonarney, Co. Westmeath

The fields around Clonarney Castle in County Westmeath hold more history than their grassy surface immediately suggests.

Spreading out to the north, east, south, and west of the castle and its associated graveyard, a series of earthworks trace the outlines of a field system that may once have supported an entire medieval settlement, though the people who lived here left almost no trace above ground. No clear house sites survive, yet the landscape still bears the imprint of organised human activity across what were evidently several distinct periods.

The most legible feature is the ridge and furrow visible to the south and east of the graveyard. Ridge and furrow is the corrugated pattern left by repeated ploughing with a heavy plough, typically medieval in origin, where soil was turned inward to create long raised strips separated by furrows. Here, though, later earthworks appear to cut across this pattern, indicating that the field was reorganised or reused at a different point in time, with the two phases sitting in visible tension with one another. Some of the smaller enclosures nearby may represent the footprints of houses whose walls have long since vanished. A possible sunken roadway, a hollow worn down by repeated traffic rather than deliberately constructed, seems to run northward from the castle and graveyard. Linear earthworks feeding into the Stonyford River, which runs immediately to the west of the site, appear to be drainage channels, though their date remains uncertain; two of them were already recorded as parallel field boundaries on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1837. The whole complex sits in close relationship with Clonarney Castle itself, and the working assumption is that the settlement, such as it was, grew up in the orbit of that structure before eventually being abandoned.

The site lies on grassland, and the linear earthworks were waterlogged when inspected on the ground, which is worth bearing in mind when approaching across the fields, particularly after wet weather. The ridge and furrow to the south and east of the graveyard is described as well preserved, and this is probably where the agricultural landscape reads most clearly underfoot.

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