Field system, Baunoge, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Baunoge, Co. Galway

Beneath the blanket bog on a west-facing hillside at Baunoge in County Galway, a set of ancient field walls has been quietly dissolving into the landscape for centuries.

Three discontinuous stretches of walling run both down and across the slope, pre-dating the bog that has since grown up around them. Pre-bog walls of this kind are among the more arresting survivals in the Irish countryside; they speak to a period when land that is now waterlogged and largely inhospitable was being actively farmed and divided, long before the peat accumulated to bury the evidence. The system covers an area of roughly 300 metres east to west and 200 metres north to south, which gives some sense of the organised agricultural effort that once took place here.

The walls are built of large granite boulders, though the smaller stones have been robbed out over time, presumably recycled into later construction nearby. At the south-east end, the ancient boundaries have been absorbed into nineteenth-century field walls, the older and newer fabric running together in a way that quietly collapses the distance between prehistoric farming and post-Famine land management. To the west, the walls simply disappear into uncut bog, their continuation a matter of inference rather than observation. Perhaps the most telling detail is that one of the boulders was at some point recorded as a standing stone, a misidentification that is easy enough to understand when a large upright granite slab sits in open ground with no obvious context around it. The two records have since been disentangled.

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Pete F
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