Field system, Taghmon, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Taghmon, Co. Wexford

Just south-west of Taghmon town in County Wexford, a grass-covered spread of roughly eighteen acres preserves the ghost of an older agricultural order.

The land is divided into rectangular plots, each approximately forty metres by thirty, separated by low earthen banks no more than half a metre high and two to three metres wide. These are not hedgerows or modern field boundaries but the kind of surviving earthwork division that tends to slip past the eye unless you are specifically looking for it, the landscape arranged in a quiet grid that predates the fields around it.

Running along the western edge of the system and curving around its south-west corner is a sunken roadway, around three hundred metres long and between five and ten metres wide. Sunken roads of this type, sometimes called hollow ways, form gradually through repeated use, hooves and wheels and feet wearing the surface down below the level of the surrounding ground until the route becomes, in effect, a channel through the landscape. That this one aligns with and serves the field plots suggests the two features belong to the same phase of land use, though the precise period remains unspecified. One detail offers a small puzzle: at a right-angled turn in one of the field banks stands a re-used granite gate-pier, just over a metre and a half tall. The word "re-used" is doing quiet work here. It implies the pier was taken from somewhere else and incorporated into the boundary, which is the kind of pragmatic recycling that tends to happen across many centuries of continuous farming on the same ground. The whole system sits just south-west of the early church site at Taghmon, a proximity that may or may not be coincidental but gives the fields an ecclesiastical neighbourhood worth bearing in mind.

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Pete F
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