Field system, Seskin, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Seskin, Co. Tipperary

Beneath a working tillage field on a gentle north-facing slope near Seskin in County Tipperary, a whole landscape of ancient boundaries and enclosures lies completely out of sight.

No earthwork rises above the grass line, no bank or ditch catches the eye of a passing walker. The only way this field system has ever been seen is from the air, where the buried features betray themselves as cropmarks, the faint differential in how crops grow over disturbed or compacted soil below revealing outlines invisible to anyone standing on the ground.

The aerial photographs that brought the site to light show a pattern of linear field boundaries associated with six enclosures, roughly circular or sub-rectangular in form. Enclosures of this kind are a common feature of the Irish prehistoric and early medieval landscape, typically serving as farmsteads or settlement compounds, and their grouping here alongside organised field boundaries suggests a farming community that once divided and worked this same ground in a deliberate, planned way. The fact that six such enclosures cluster together points to something more than an isolated farmstead; this may have been a small settlement, its internal organisation now legible only through the language of crop stress read from altitude.

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Pete F
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