Field system, Rahally, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Rahally, Co. Galway

On a west-facing slope in Rahally, County Galway, the ground still holds the shape of a working landscape that nobody has farmed for centuries.

A series of earthen banks traces out roughly rectangular fields across an area of approximately 250 metres east to west and 200 metres north to south, and within those fields the faint parallel ridges of old cultivation furrows remain legible in the grass. What makes the site quietly arresting is not any single feature but the completeness of the picture: the fields, the ridges inside them, and a curving trackway that once connected it all, still present together in the same patch of hillside.

The trackway is perhaps the most evocative element. Running for around 200 metres and about 5 metres wide, it is defined by its own parallel banks and bends gently through the monument rather than cutting across it in a straight line, which suggests it grew organically alongside the farming activity rather than being imposed on it afterwards. The word used to describe this relationship is coeval, meaning the trackway and the field system were in use at the same time, laid down together as part of a single agricultural arrangement. Roughly 250 metres to the south-east sits a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular bank and ditch surrounding a dwelling. The proximity of the ringfort to the field system raises the reasonable possibility that the two are connected, that the banks and ridges at Rahally represent the working land attached to whoever once lived within that enclosure.

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Pete F
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