Field system

The National Monuments Service's description

At the N end of a narrow valley (‘Rathborney Valley’) in pastureland, between Gleninagh ‘Mountain’ and Cappanawalla Hill. A complex series of field-systems, mostly post-dating but also potentially contemporary with and pre-dating a cashel (CL002-030002-), extend across the valley floor and up on to the karst to the W and N. Field survey in 1997 noted at least three phases of walls, old meandering walls (Wth 3m; H 0.4–0.6m), later but still possibly pre-famine walls (Wth 2m; H 0.5–0.7m) and modern strip walls. There are particularly dense concentrations of field boundaries abutting the W side of the cashel and centred around several post-medieval houses at the base of the N exit of the valley, c.180m NE of the cashel. Many of the earlier two phases of walls are not depicted on the 1842 or 1915 eds. of the OS 6-inch maps and there are at least elements within both concentrations that fit best with Plunkett Dillon’s (1985) and later writer’s (Jones, Carey and Hennigar 2011; Jones 2016) tumble walls. This would suggest that they are contemporary with the later medieval use of the cashel. Support for this might be taken from a pollen core taken from Poulacapple bog c. 4km to the S (Jeličić and O'Connell 1992) that suggested that locally there was increasingly intensive arable farming from c. 1000 AD until a shift to wetter conditions sometime before 1650 AD. There are two other complex field-systems containing elements of potential antiquity in Rathborney Valley, CL002-075002- in the NE corner and CL002-033001- along the E side. Each of these also encompasses one or more enclosures or ringforts. These may once have extended across the fertile valley floor, and essentially formed one or several interconnected field systems with CL002-030001-, but clearance and reorganisation of the fields between the 1842 and 1915 eds. of the OS 6-inch maps and the inclusion of strip fields within these since the 1915 ed. have removed any visible trace.

The following image has been uploaded:
CL002-030001-_01.jpg View of field system on Digital Globe.

Compiled by: Mary Tunney and Ros Ó Maoldúin

Date of upload: 19 November 2020

References

Plunkett Dillon, E.C. 1985 The field boundaries of the Burren, County Clare. Unpublished PhD thesis, Trinity College, Dublin.

Jones, C. 2016 Dating ancient field walls in karst landscapes using differentil bedrock lowering. Geoarchaeology, 31 (2), 77-100.

Jeličić, L. and O'Connell, M. 1992 History of vegetation and land use from 3200 BP to the present in the north-west Burren, a karstic region of western Ireland. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 1(3), 119-40.

Jones, C. 2019 Climate change and farming response in a temperate oceanic zone - the exploitation of a karstic region in Western Ireland in the third and second m illennia BC. The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology, online publication, https://doi.org/10.1080.15564894.2019.1614115.