Field system, Westquarter, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Ritual/Ceremonial
On the north-facing slope of Crocmore hill, at the western end of Inishbofin, a grid of low stone foundations emerges from ground that has been stripped entirely of its bog and scraw cover.
What survives is a field system stretching roughly 650 metres from northwest to southeast and about 250 metres across, comprising a series of small, roughly rectangular enclosures and one larger subrectangular field at the southeastern end. The walls themselves are gone in any practical sense; what remains are the angular boulders and stones that once formed their base, pressed into the hillside as if the landscape has been quietly exhaling them back to the surface.
The uncertainty surrounding this place is part of what makes it genuinely interesting. The walls could belong to a pre-bog field system, meaning they were laid down before the peat grew over them, which would place them in considerable antiquity, since blanket bog formation in the west of Ireland typically began thousands of years ago. Alternatively, they may have some connection to the nearby promontory fort known as Dunmore, situated about 380 metres to the southwest. A promontory fort is a defended enclosure using a natural headland as part of its perimeter, and Dunmore is a known example on the island. There is also a third possibility: the Napoleonic Wars period, when pressure on food supply led to the cultivation of marginal and previously unused land across Ireland, brought many rocky or boggy hillsides into temporary agricultural use. The antiquarian T. J. Westropp, writing in 1911, recorded five house sites in the area to the east of Dunmore, and a possible house site noted at the western end of this field system may be among them, pointing towards a more recent episode of settlement rather than prehistoric land use. Paul Gosling, writing in 1993, drew together these possibilities without resolving them, and they remain open.
The field system sits in an area where the removal of bog cover has made these foundations visible in a way that would otherwise be impossible. Visitors walking the western end of Inishbofin can look across the slope of Crocmore hill and read the faint geometry of the walls in the ground, a landscape that refuses to settle into a single period or story.