Field system, Grange (Smallcounty By.), Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Ritual/Ceremonial
On the rocky summit of Ardaghlooda, a low ridge above Lough Gur in County Limerick, a set of ancient field walls runs quietly across the hillside, largely unnoticed by the visitors who come to the area for its more celebrated monuments.
The field system sits just 220 metres east of the great Grange stone circle, one of the largest and best-preserved stone circles in Ireland, yet it occupies a very different register of history, one written not in ceremony but in the ordinary business of farming and land division. What makes the site quietly arresting is precisely this ordinariness, and the way it complicates the landscape around it.
The system comprises five parallel stone boundaries running east to west across a span of roughly 330 metres north to south and 265 metres east to west, with the intervals between individual walls ranging from 25 to 95 metres. North to south walls link the parallel boundaries, forming a coherent, if now ruinous, network. It was the archaeologist Seán P. Ó Ríordáin who first identified the remains as a relic field system, describing them as field fences and enclosures in publications from 1951 and 1954. O'Kelly and O'Kelly returned to the site in 1981, noting a circular enclosure, several hut sites, and the broader system of ancient fields. Crucially, the field boundaries overlie and cut through three earlier circular enclosures on the hill, which means the farming landscape is itself built on top of an older one. The western edge of the field system aligns with a sunken historic road known as Cladh na Leac, and the structural relationship between the two suggests they were in use at the same time. A standing stone sits within the field system, lending the site a further layer of complexity. None of this appears on the Ordnance Survey maps of 1840 or 1897; the boundaries only became clearly legible through aerial orthoimages captured from 2005 onwards.
The site sits on rocky pasture at the Lough Gur end of Ardaghlooda, with the lake forming its eastern boundary. Access to this part of the landscape is best approached via the Lough Gur visitor circuit, though the field system itself is not formally marked or interpreted on the ground. The walls are low and partially collapsed, so what a visitor is really looking for is pattern rather than height, a series of faint linear ridges in the grass and stone that only resolve into meaning once you know what you are seeing. Aerial imagery on platforms such as Google Earth, where the system is clearly visible in images from 2016, 2017, and 2020, is worth consulting before a visit.