Field system, Lugbaun, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Lugbaun, Co. Sligo

At Lugbaun in County Sligo, a grid of old field walls sits in a natural hollow in the ground, invisible to anyone relying on an Ordnance Survey map.

No edition of the OS 6-inch series ever recorded it. The site came to light not through ground survey but through aerial photography, which picked out what the cartographers had missed, a structured arrangement of small rectangular and sub-rectangular plots covering roughly 150 metres north to south and east to west, tucked into the base and sides of a naturally-occurring depression and now hemmed in on all sides by modern field boundaries.

What survives on the ground is low but legible. The field walls, somewhere between one and a half and two metres wide but only about half a metre tall, are dilapidated rather than collapsed entirely, and together they form a coherent grid aligned north-south and east-west. The whole layout radiates from a sinuous central wall running roughly north-northeast to south-southwest, with smaller boundaries branching off it along an east-west axis, giving the system something of a spine-and-rib character. Worked into the south-western corner of the grid is a low hillock whose flattened top, measuring approximately 22 metres by 11 metres, appears to have been enclosed at some point. A few metres to the east of the hillock, a small roughly circular area, about 8.5 metres by 7 metres, is enclosed by a rough wall of very loose stone. Just north of that feature, at the junction of two walls, a patch of wet ground suggests the presence of a spring well. Whether the enclosed hillock served a practical or ceremonial purpose, and how old the whole system actually is, remains an open question. The site has been flagged as of potential archaeological significance, though no date has been firmly established.

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Pete F
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