Field system, Keelhilla, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ritual/Ceremonial
Scattered across a stretch of karst pavement in County Clare, part-hidden beneath creeping scrub, is an irregular field system that raises more questions than it answers.
Karst pavement, the bare fractured limestone characteristic of the Burren, is not conventionally thought of as farmland, yet here is evidence that someone once divided it up and enclosed it, marking out boundaries with what appear to be slab walls across a rough rectangle stretching approximately 250 metres east to west and 90 metres north to south.
The system was reported by Ros Ó Maoldúin and identified from aerial imagery captured between 2013 and 2018. The slab walls, rather than the more familiar dry-stone construction, suggest a building tradition that worked with whatever the limestone landscape offered directly. Field systems on karst can be genuinely difficult to date without excavation; they may belong to any period from the prehistoric to the post-medieval, and the Burren is known to preserve early agricultural remains precisely because later intensive farming largely passed it by. Without further investigation, the age and purpose of these particular enclosures remain open questions.
The site sits on fairly level ground, which is itself somewhat unusual given how broken and uneven karst terrain can be, and the scrub cover that partly obscures it today is a reminder of how quickly the landscape reclaims divisions that are no longer maintained.