What is recorded here

Half-buried stone ribs stretch across the hilly commonage near Knocknaveen, marking boundaries older than the enclosures they touch. People later pulled stones from those walls to build turf stacks, yet the lines still weave past ancient monuments and faded streams. The field system records a place where human hands kept shaping, taking and remembering long after its first makers disappeared.

Situated on the rolling hilly commonage to NE of Knocknaveen: this field system extends over an ill-defined area of at least 600m. Its southern limits appear to lie close to a megalithic tomb (MA085-008001-), while it is truncated to E by a Congested Districts Board boundary wall. To N and NE, the walls peter out at least 200m short of the Lighthouse Road, and to W intermittent traces of walls are discernible as far as the lower reaches of the stream marked ‘Pollbrandy’ on the OS 6-inch maps. Besides the megalithic tomb, these walls are closely associated with a number of prehistoric monuments including at least seven fulachtaí fia (MA085-006001- to MA006003-; MA085-007001-; MA085-007002-; MA085-008003-; MA085-045----) and four settlement areas/enclosures (MA085-064- --- to MA085-066----). The whole area appears to have been cutover for peat in the recent past: where visible in old peat cuttings, the walls appear to sit directly on the mineral soil. The field system consists of a series of ruinous drystone boundary walls meandering across the hilly boulder-strewn commonage. These are composed of linear tumbles of loose stone sitting on the mineral soil, ranging from 0.5m to 2m wide but seldom exceeding 0.5m high. Their lines are sometimes interrupted by old turf stacks that appear to have been built by robbing stone from them. While they do not form any coherent pattern, some of them appear to acknowledge the presence of the monuments, particularly the enclosures. (Gosling et al 2007, 199). In July 1995 a cutting was archaeologically excavated (94E156) across one of the field walls, where it intersected with the SW side of an enclosure (MA085-063----) (King 2007, 267-289). The aim of the excavation was to establish the chronological relationship of the field wall to the enclosure. The field wall (Wth 1m; max. H 0.5m) extended NNE−SSW, and was overlain close to its intersection with the enclosure by a later turf stack. A 3m length of the field wall was investigated, revealing that it was built in a shallow foundation trench. It predated the construction of the enclosure; in fact, the S end of the wall appeared to have been partly dismantled during the construction of the enclosure. Insufficient charcoal was recovered from the field wall and the enclosure to allow conventional radiocarbon dating, but an assemblage of flint, chert and quartz artefacts found within the enclosure points to a prehistoric, probably Bronze Age, date. (King 2007, 267-289). The above description is derived from: New Survey of Clare Island. Volume 5: Archaeology. Edited by Paul Gosling, Conleth Manning and John Waddell. (Royal Irish Academy, Dublin. 2007). In certain instances the entries have been revised and updated. Date of upload: 11 December 2018

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