Field system, Kilcreevanty, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Kilcreevanty, Co. Galway

Around the medieval nunnery at Kilcreevanty in County Galway, the ground holds more than most people passing the graveyard wall would guess.

Spreading principally to the west and north of the site, an extensive series of earthen banks divides the land into a patchwork of irregular fields, covering an area roughly 300 metres north to south and 250 metres east to west. Within several of these enclosures, faint traces of cultivation ridges survive, the low parallel undulations left by generations of hand-worked agriculture. Alongside the field boundaries, the foundations of at least two rectangular houses are still visible close to the graveyard. It is the kind of landscape that rewards patient looking, where the components only resolve into meaning once you start reading the ground as a whole rather than as scattered bumps and lines.

The relationship between the field system and Kilcreevanty Nunnery is intriguing precisely because it is not straightforward. Some of the earthen banks follow a gentle arc curving from west to north around the graveyard, a layout that might suggest the outer boundary of a formal ecclesiastical enclosure, the sort of circular or subcircular precinct commonly associated with early Irish monastic sites. However, no definite trace of such an enclosure has been identified here. Whether the curving banks represent a degraded ecclesiastical boundary, a later agricultural arrangement that simply followed the topography, or something else entirely remains an open question. The site as a whole is subject to a preservation order under the National Monuments Acts, which reflects its significance as a complex of overlapping histories rather than any single monument.

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