Field system, Cloonteen, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ritual/Ceremonial
Beneath the gently undulating grassland of Cloonteen, in north County Galway, a whole landscape has been quietly subsiding into the ground.
What appears from the surface to be ordinary pasture turns out, when viewed from the air, to be an extensive palimpsest of collapsed stone walls and earthen banks stretching roughly 900 metres east to west and 450 metres north to south. It was only in July 1967, during an aerial reconnaissance flight, that the full scale of the complex became apparent. The photograph brought into focus something that had been invisible at ground level: a series of small, irregular fields containing the remains of multiple structures, all folded into one another across a considerable area of Connacht countryside.
Within those field boundaries, the range of features is quietly remarkable. There are two ringforts, the circular earthwork enclosures that were the standard form of rural farmstead in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth century. Alongside them sit two rectangular enclosures, a circular enclosure, a holy well, and a limekiln, the last being a stone-built furnace used to burn limestone into quicklime for agricultural use, a technology common from the post-medieval period onward. Close to the north-eastern edge of the complex, a rectangular house survives in slightly better condition than the rest: it measures 7.8 metres by 4.8 metres, its drystone walls partially grassed over but still legible. An entrance survives in the north wall, and the interior appears to have been divided into three compartments. A second, separate field system lies roughly 400 metres to the east-north-east, suggesting that this part of Galway was once considerably more intensively settled and managed than it appears today.
The site is not signposted or presented for visitors, and most of what is described here remains embedded in ordinary farmland. For anyone approaching on foot, the aerial photograph from 1967 remains the clearest way to orient oneself within what is otherwise a subtle scatter of low, grassed-over features.