{"id":27,"date":"2014-06-13T19:40:08","date_gmt":"2014-06-13T19:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/opentextbooks.concordia.ca\/irishlandscape\/chapter\/2-3-urbanization-in-british-columbia\/"},"modified":"2025-07-07T17:54:04","modified_gmt":"2025-07-07T17:54:04","slug":"ceide-fields","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/opentextbooks.concordia.ca\/irishlandscape\/chapter\/ceide-fields\/","title":{"raw":"1.2 Case Study: C\u00e9ide Fields","rendered":"1.2 Case Study: C\u00e9ide Fields"},"content":{"raw":"In Ireland, boglands \u2013 wetland regions comprising water and decomposing vegetation, such as peat underneath the surface and sphagnum moss on the surface \u2013 are important aspects of the Irish Landscape that hold histories relevant to physical, human and cultural geography.\r\n\r\n \r\n
See Chapter Four<\/strong><\/a> to learn more about what a bog is made up of.<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\nBogs offer an important setting for the preservation of a range of artefacts \u2013 from human bodies and barrels of butter to ships and farm lands. Because of their lack of oxygen and acidic soil, bogs are able to preserve these artefacts for thousands of years without decomposition. The bogs of Ireland are physical landscapes that tell historians and geographers alike what happened in a place across a long period of time.\r\n\r\nIn this section, we will look at an example of how bogs have preserved land systems in Ireland that are thousands of years old through a case study of C\u00e9ide Fields. As mentioned above, C\u00e9ide Fields is an area on the west coast of Ireland that dates nearly 6,000 years old. Blanket bogs formed over the region beginning around 2,300 B.C.E.; over time, blanket bogs ultimately covered the area of farming communities, degrading the farm land and forcing out farming communities who had lived on Ireland\u2019s west coast from earlier in the Neolithic period (beginning in approximately 3,500 B.C.E.) (O\u2019Connell, Molloy, and Jennings 2020). These farmers had cleared the originally forested land (mainly of pine trees) to create space for agriculture, which archeologists believe allowed for crop growth nearly year-round during the time that the farmers inhabited the land. A subsequent change in climate, around 2,300 B.C.E., precipitated the formation of blanket and raised bogs that made the land unfarmable - and thus uninhabitable - for those living in the region; however, the change in climate also allowed for the large-scale preservation of the aforementioned farming systems through the boglands\u2019 combination of little oxygen and acidic soil.\r\n\r\nThe contemporary discovery of C\u00e9ide Fields occurred in the 1930s when a schoolteacher, Patrick Caulfield, noticed piles of rocks while cutting peat, that ultimately revealed portions of the oldest known field system in the world (Irish Archaeology n.d.). The uncovering and preservation of this region followed Caufield\u2019s discovery, and today, C\u00e9ide Fields is an example of a Celtic field system that you can visit, and is scheduled to become a UNESCO world heritage site (Irish Archaeology n.d.). In Figure 1.6 below, the red lines depict the extent and scale of these fieldwalls that divided up farming land, uncovered at the C\u00e9ide Fields bogs in the 1930s. In the top right-hand corner, you can see that these walls are only a portion of the discovered walls, with more discovered to the south-east of the site where the visitor centre is located. Also note the broken red lines in the southern portion of Figure 1.6 - do the gaps in walls and isolated wall segments suggest uncovered or undiscovered parts of the fieldwalls, yet to be discovered?\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_419\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"882\"]\"Ariel Figure 1.6<\/strong> A map depicting the extent of historical farmland surrounding the C\u00e9ide Fields Visitor Centre from Finola Finlay's photo blog.View Source\u00a0<\/a> This photograph is included on the basis of fair dealing.\u00a0<\/em>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nInteractive Video Activity<\/strong>\r\n\r\nWatch the film trailer (Figure 1.7) to learn more about C\u00e9ide Fields, and answer questions in the interactivity to test your knowledge. This trailer also offers unique vantage points for seeing the extent and discovery of the fieldwalls of C\u00e9ide fields; for example:\r\n