Field system, Knocknaganny, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ritual/Ceremonial
In the rolling limestone grassland at Knocknaganny, a small community once farmed, lived in houses, and moved along a road that no longer exists.
The only reason we know any of this is because an aerial photograph caught the faint geometry of it before the ground was smoothed over: subrectangular walled fields laid out around an older cashel, with cultivation ridges still readable from the air. A cashel, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a stone-walled enclosure of early medieval origin, typically circular or oval, built to protect a farmstead or settlement. The field system here is younger than that cashel, which means the land around an already-ancient monument was still being actively worked by people who came considerably later.
The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded five houses or buildings at this spot, with an access road running in from the south and east. That cluster of rectangular vernacular houses was also visible in aerial photography, sitting roughly fifty-five metres to the south-east of the cashel, ruined but legible. By the time later map editions were produced, the settlement had vanished from the record entirely. The landscape here is karst country, broken by exposed limestone and rock outcroppings, which gives the terrain a quality that tends to preserve earthworks rather than absorb them quietly. That makes what happened next all the more complete: reclamation works removed almost every trace of the field walls, the cultivation ridges, and the settlement itself. What remains at the surface amounts to a few slight undulations in the ground.