Field system, Sheeanmore, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Sheeanmore, Co. Sligo

On a gently undulating pasture north of Sheeanmore Hill in County Sligo, a set of low earthen banks traces out the ghost of an old agricultural landscape.

To the untrained eye they might read as nothing more than slight rises in rough grazing land, but what survives here is a relic field system, the residual framework of a way of dividing and working land that long predates the familiar rectangular enclosures of the post-medieval countryside.

The most legible element is a north-south boundary running for roughly 250 metres in a gentle meander across the slope. It survives as a bank of earth and stone around three metres wide and up to half a metre tall, with a shallow fosse or drainage ditch running along its eastern side. A second, shorter boundary curves east-west for about 60 metres, connecting to the western face of the main bank and sitting along the crest of a low natural scarp in the hillside. These two elements give the system what shape it still has above ground. A further set of east-west boundaries was recorded on the 1913 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, but those have since been levelled and are no longer visible at ground level, which is a reminder of how quickly such features can disappear under modern farming pressure. What the 1913 map shows is a series of curving boundaries, quite unlike the rigid geometry of later land division, suggesting an older, more organic pattern of enclosure that followed the natural contours of the terrain rather than imposing straight lines upon it. The field system does not stand in isolation; it extends southward into a broader archaeological complex on Sheeanmore Hill itself, implying that the landscape here has accumulated human activity across a considerable stretch of time.

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Pete F
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