Field system, Fedamore, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ritual/Ceremonial
A field that has not been farmed for centuries can still leave its mark on the land, and at Fedamore in County Limerick, that mark is legible from the air.
Aerial photographs, both from Digital Globe satellite imagery and earlier Ordnance Survey Ireland coverage, reveal a cropmark of a large enclosure alongside a series of ridge and furrow cultivation ridges. Ridge and furrow is the corrugated pattern left by repeated ploughing in one direction over many seasons, the soil building up into long parallel mounds that resist erasure even after the plough has long stopped. What makes Fedamore quietly interesting is the scale and arrangement: a sizeable central enclosure, possibly a large field or paddock, surrounded by smaller fields, all of it suggesting an organised agricultural landscape rather than scattered casual farming.
The context points towards the medieval period. The field system is thought to be associated with the medieval manor of Fedamore, a settlement that also left two other significant traces nearby. Fedamore Church lies roughly 220 metres to the south, and the site of Fedamore Castle sits approximately 500 metres to the south-west. Taken together, these three elements, the church, the castle, and the cultivated fields, suggest a reasonably substantial medieval settlement, with the field system forming its working agricultural hinterland. The record was compiled by Caimin O'Brien and uploaded in March 2020 as part of a broader programme of documenting sites identified through aerial survey.
The field system is not marked or interpreted on the ground, and there is nothing visible at surface level that would tell you anything unusual had once been worked here. The cropmarks are only apparent from aerial photographs, which can be accessed through the Historic Environment Viewer on the National Monuments Service website, where the record is listed under reference LI022-102----. For anyone visiting the general area, the proximity of the church and castle sites provides a more tangible anchor; standing between them, with the open farmland stretching away, it is possible to read the landscape as something more layered than it first appears.