Field system, Laurclavagh, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Laurclavagh, Co. Galway

Beneath the flat farmland of Laurclavagh in County Galway, a ghost landscape is slowly surfacing.

What appears at ground level to be ordinary agricultural terrain conceals the collapsed remains of an ancient field system so extensive that its true shape only became legible from the air, when aerial reconnaissance in November 1987 traced a grid of walls stretching roughly a kilometre from north to south and some six hundred metres from east to west. The scale of the thing is quietly arresting: not a single enclosure or a modest boundary, but an organised, differentiated landscape of fields in varying sizes and shapes, all of them now reduced to low rubble.

When the site was inspected on the ground in 2008, the collapsed drystone walls, built without mortar in the traditional manner of the region, measured between 1.75 and 2.7 metres in width, though they had slumped to a maximum height of just 0.3 metres. They lay within a larger subrectangular field of around 500 metres by 450 metres, itself bounded by later walls, suggesting that more recent farming activity had overlaid and partially absorbed the older system. The fields to the east and south had already been reclaimed entirely, swallowed back into working agricultural use. Two possible hut sites were also identified within the area, hinting that this was not merely a field boundary system but the remnant of a settled, managed community, though the date of that settlement is not firmly established. The limestone pavement that breaks through in patches across the landscape is characteristic of this part of north Galway, and it is the kind of terrain that has been farmed, abandoned, and reoccupied across many centuries.

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Pete F
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