Field system, Faunarooska, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Faunarooska, Co. Clare

In the limestone landscape of west Clare, a vast pattern of ancient boundaries stretches across the ground for roughly five and a half kilometres from north to south and around two kilometres from east to west.

It is the kind of feature that becomes legible only from above, visible in aerial photography where centuries of enclosure, field division, and settlement leave their trace on the land long after any living memory of their use has faded.

The system runs from Formoyle in the north, across Faunarooska, and down to Lislarheen Beg in the south. Within it lie numerous cashels, which are stone-walled ringforts of early medieval date, alongside other enclosures and several wedge tombs. Wedge tombs are among the oldest megalithic monument types in Ireland, typically dating to the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, roughly 2500 to 2000 BC, and are so called because the burial chamber narrows and lowers from front to back. Their presence here alongside what appear to be much later field boundaries and settlement features suggests that people were organising and working this landscape across an extraordinarily long stretch of time. The coincidence of monuments from such different periods in one continuous field system points to a place that was returned to, built upon, and subdivided again and again rather than simply abandoned.

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