Field system, Lisduff, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Lisduff, Co. Mayo

Beneath the grass of a low rise in County Mayo, an entire agricultural landscape lies quietly dissolved into the ground.

What looks like ordinary pasture on the margins of rolling limestone country is, on closer inspection, a network of field plots covering more than 4,000 square metres, their boundaries reduced to low, meandering banks of earth and stone. These banks, many of them incorporating large boulders, are almost certainly the remains of field walls that have been levelled and grassed over across the centuries, their original lines still just legible as gentle undulations in the turf.

The field system was recorded by Lavelle in 1994, who noted hut sites and possible enclosures alongside the field plots themselves. The plots vary considerably in size, from roughly 25 by 35 metres up to 60 by 70 metres, and they do not follow a rigid grid; instead they meander with the natural contours of the terrain, as if shaped gradually by generations of small adjustments rather than any single act of planning. Inside the plots, traces of cultivation ridges survive on various orientations, suggesting the land was worked in different phases or by different methods over time. Scattered among them are small, low heaps of stone, the kind left behind when a field is cleared of surface rock before ploughing, a practice as old as Irish farming itself. At the north-western edge of the system stands a ringfort, a circular enclosure of the kind typically associated with early medieval farmsteads, and within one of the field plots there are traces of a possible house. The whole complex sits on a rise with open views northward toward low-lying damp ground, the sort of position that would have made practical sense for anyone trying to farm this part of Mayo.

The system today is contained within a single modern field bordered by a drystone wall, and the old plot boundaries on the margins are fragmentary, worn down to almost nothing. Beyond the drystone wall, in the surrounding fields, the ancient pattern has vanished entirely. What survives does so only because it happened to fall within one enclosure, a matter of chance as much as anything else.

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