Field system, Glen (Clanwilliam By.), Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ritual/Ceremonial
On the rough upland pasture straddling the townlands of Glen and Pallashill in County Limerick, a ghost landscape of former agriculture is slowly dissolving back into the hillside.
Spread across approximately 24 hectares, around ten fields of varying shapes, some rectangular, some subrectangular, some irregular, can still be traced through a network of low earthen and stone walls. The walls themselves are modest things, sod-covered and partly collapsed, measuring roughly 4.65 metres wide with an external height of about 0.6 metres, but their layout is methodical enough to read clearly from the air, a series of linear earthworks intersecting at right angles in a pattern that speaks to deliberate organisation rather than casual enclosure.
The system runs from the hilltop in Glen down an east-facing slope into Pallashill, and it carries within it several associated features: enclosures, and what are recorded as hut sites, suggesting that whoever worked these fields may also have lived among them. Particularly telling are the lazy beds visible on the eastern side and in the southern area of the system. Lazy beds are a traditional method of cultivation in which soil is mounded into parallel ridges, typically to improve drainage on wet or marginal ground; their presence here, each ridge roughly 1.5 metres wide and 0.15 metres high, points to intensive tillage on land that would not have been easy to farm. The field system was already significant enough to be depicted on the revised 1897 edition of the Ordnance Survey 25-inch map, and it was identified again in oblique aerial photographs taken on 10 July 1967 as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography. The Archaeological Survey of Ireland formally surveyed the monument in 2008, with the record compiled by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly.
The site sits in undulating upland terrain, and the earthworks are most legible either from the air or in low, raking light when shadows pick out the ridges and field banks against the grass. A trigonometric point, one of the survey markers used in the construction of historical maps, sits on the western side and provides a useful landmark. The enclosures and hut sites recorded within the field system add further texture to what is already a layered landscape, and anyone visiting on foot should expect rough, uneven ground across the full extent of the 24-hectare area.