The Céide Fields
Ireland and the Short Chronology – Part 16
Discovery of the Céide Fields
In the 1930s a schoolteacher in the west of Ireland made an extraordinary discovery. Patrick Caulfield was harvesting peat from a bog in County Mayo when he came upon heaps of stones whose regular placement suggested to him an intelligent design. The configuration of the stones resembled a system of walled fields, but because the stones were buried beneath several metres of blanket bog, Caulfield realized that these fields must have been last worked many centuries or millennia ago.
In 1934 Caulfield informed the National Museum of his findings, but the academic world paid little attention to the discovery. It was not until the late 1960s that his son Séamus, a qualified archaeologist, made it his life’s work to excavate the fields and reveal the lost world that lay beneath the bog. He did this by painstakingly probing the site with steel and bamboo rods. This allowed him to map the entire site without disturbing the stones or removing their protective layer of peat. Today, thanks to Caulfield’s efforts, the Céide Fields is recognized as the most extensive Neolithic site in the World and the oldest known field system. It is currently dated to 3500 BCE. The onsite visitor centre, a post-modern ziggurat designed by architect Mary McKenna, is as much a tourist attraction as the archaeological site itself.
Céide is an Irish word:
céide, g. [genitive] id. [the same], m. [masculine], a green, a course, a plateau, a flat-topped hill; a racecourse, an assembly, a fair; a way, a path ... common in place-names ... (Dinneen 183)
The pronunciation is approximately KAY-jeh. Achaidh Chéide, Céide Fields, is a modern name.
Professor Caulfield’s excavations led him to conclude that cattle farming was the predominant agricultural activity at the Céide Fields: these were not arable fields in which crops were grown, but pastures for grazing livestock. Armed with nothing but primitive stone implements, the Neolithic farmers had laboriously cleared about twelve square kilometres (1200 hectares) of pine forest to provide grazing land for their cattle.
The plan of the Céide Fields has been identified as coaxial:
Being systematically laid out according to one major axis—in this case predominantly northeast–southwest—the Céide Hill complex is identified by Fleming (e.g. 1987) among the ‘coaxial’ field systems of Britain and Ireland. Coaxial systems are themselves a subset of the wider European phenomenon of ‘Celtic’ fields. These are found in many parts of north-western Europe, including Sweden, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Britain, but generally they are seen as a phenomenon beginning in the Middle Bronze Age around 1500 BC, and extending into the Roman period, possibly as late as the fourth century AD ... (Whitefield 258-259)
The fields are 150-200 m wide and up to 700 m long (Molloy & O’Connell 192), and encompass an area of about 1200 hectares (Caulfield et al 629). They are eerily reminiscent—preminiscent?—of the ladder fields of the early 19th century:
... parallel-sided strips of land running up and down the slope with each strip having a share of the low ground fit for tillage, the middle ground for hay, and the steeper hill ground for grazing. (Faulkner & Thompson 241)
Andrew Whitefield
In 2017 archaeologist Andrew Whitefield, of the National University of Ireland, Galway, published a paper in the European Journal of Archaeology which called into question the chronology of the Céide Fields:
It has long been claimed that the coaxial stone boundaries of Céide Fields, County Mayo, are a phenomenon of the Irish Early Neolithic—analogous to later prehistoric “Celtic” fields in all but age. This study argues that the age disparity is an artefact of the research methods, and that the age of the main Céide Fields complex has been overestimated by as much as two-and-a-half millennia. (Whitefield 257)
Whitefield believes that the low, broad profile of the stone boundaries and the lack of obvious gateways and droveways indicate that the boundaries are not so much walls as linear clearance cairns. The fields, in Whitefield’s opinion, were predominantly arable:
Elsewhere, the long axial boundaries characteristic of many ‘Celtic’ fields have typically been interpreted as evidence of cultivation, allowing ‘the plough-team an uninterrupted progression from one end to the other’ (Harding, 2000, 153; Johnston, 2013:323–24). (Whitefield 259)
Séamus Caulfield, the archaeologist who devoted most of his career to proving that the Céide Fields were created and worked by pre-Celtic Neolithic farmers more than five and a half thousand years ago, is reported to have described Whitefield’s thesis as a silent ambush of his life’s work (Mayo News).
Andrew Whitefield is not a maverick who supports the Short Chronology. Being a mainstream archaeologist, he has probably never even heard of the Short Chronology. He believes that there was a Mesolithic age in Ireland more than nine thousand years ago, followed by a Neolithic age, a Bronze age and an Iron age. He accepts that agriculture was introduced to this island about six thousand years ago by pre-Celtic Stone Age farmers.
Whitefield has also challenged Caulfield’s contention that the Céide Fields were laid out in a single operation according to a predetermined plan:
This remains the consensus interpretation (e.g. Cooney et al., 2011: 616). Researchers investigating similar field systems elsewhere, however, have challenged such a perspective. In place of a grand plan, it has been argued that the structure of similar field systems may have emerged within traditions of tenure (e.g. Johnston, 2005). In this model, fields may have been added, or larger fields subdivided, according to the developing requirements of kin groups or communities (e.g. Chadwick, 2008b). (Whitefield 259-260)
Traditions of tenure is the sort of phrase that one might readily apply to our Celtic ancestors of the last two millennia, but it sounds wildly anachronistic when applied to Neolithic farmers of 3500 BCE or Bronze Age communities of 1500 BCE.
Dating the Céide Fields
While Caulfield and Whitefield disagree on the chronology of the Céide Fields, they both base their respective opinions on the results of radiocarbon dating. In my opinion, all such dates must be considered suspect. One important clue to the age of the Céide Fields is provided by a local megalithic tomb known as the Behy Court Tomb:
The excavation of the monument during the 1960s led to the discovery of a section of field wall that met with the edge of the cairn (Herity, 1971: 262). It was immediately clear, however, that the wall—which incorporated stone quarried from the cairn—was later than the monument. (Whitefield 261-263)
This monument, like most of Ireland’s megalithic tombs, is ascribed to the Neolithic era. In this series of articles I have argued that there was no Irish Neolithic age: the megalithic monuments of Ireland were constructed by the Celts after 500 BCE.
Since its excavation in the ’60s, the Behy Court Tomb has been largely reclaimed by the bog—a striking indication of just how quickly peat can accumulate in this landscape (Gazetteer of Irish Prehistoric Monuments). The fact that the Céide Fields are now buried beneath 2-5 metres of peat does not preclude the possibility that they were abandoned as late as the 6th century of the Common Era. After the site was abandoned, there was a period before the formation of the bog during which natural reforestation took place. This follows the analysis of the local archaeobotanical sequence by Karen Molloy and Michael O’Connell, which was partly based on long peat cores (GLU I-IV) extracted at Glenulra on the eastern edge of the Céide Fields:
Molloy and O’Connell identify a sequence of change in the Glenulra basin deposits that begins with a heavily forested pre-Neolithic environment [zone 4] ... This is followed ... by a return to ‘more typical wet bog conditions and relatively fast and steady peat accumulation’ [subzone 5a] ... ‘[b]ecause the regular layout of the extensive field walls required an open landscape, it is likely that the main field system was laid out during this time’ ... Sphagnum remains at elevated levels for much of Molloy and O’Connell’s subzone 5b ... Sphagnum begins to decline around the midpoint of the subzone, which is taken to suggest ‘some drying out of the bog surface’ ... Subzones 5b and 5c are taken to correspond with the ‘major phase’ of Neolithic farming activity. The conjectural ‘reduced, though still substantial, level of farming’ in subzone 5c—seen as indicated by the decline in grasses and other non-arboreal species—is taken to be followed by the abandonment of the field system in subzone 6a, as arboreal species continue to recover. In this model, subzone 6b sees a return to full woodland cover ... Although Molloy & O’Connell acknowledge that profile GLU IV does not show when peat began to grow over the nearby field system, the increased proportion of pine pollen in subzone 6b was taken as ‘undoubtedly, reflecting the regional colonization by pine of peat surfaces which now, at least partly, cover the stone-wall field system’ ... (Whitefield 271-272)
The site was not abandoned because it was overrun by the encroaching bog. The land was still fertile and cultivable when the farming stopped—sufficiently so for extensive reforestation to take place. I believe that the Céide Fields were abandoned in the 6th century of the present era when the Justinian Plagues—known in the Irish annals as Mortalitas magna or Great Dying— decimated the population of Ireland, destroyed the island’s agricultural industry, and plunged the country into the Dark Ages.
“Celtic” Field System
Although Whitefield places the Céide Fields in a pre-Celtic Bronze Age, he identifies them with a well-established field pattern known as “Celtic”:
The complex is a textbook example of a ‘Celtic’ field system—a well-documented phenomenon of the Middle to Late Bronze Age and Iron Age in Europe. (Whitefield 257)
The term Celtic must be imprisoned between quotes lest one make the grave mistake of assuming that this field system has something to do with the Celts!
Question: Why is a Bronze Age field system called Celtic?
Not difficult: Because when this system was first identified in 1923 by O G S Crawford it was ascribed to the Celts:
Those who have walked over the chalk downs of Southern England cannot fail to have observed certain low grass banks and narrow shelves of soil which are to be found there. A closer inspection shows then to be arranged in a chess-board pattern of squares and rectangles and other figures. They are most common on sloping ground and reach the greatest dimensions on the sides of steep valleys. They differ from other banks in that they are not usually accompanied by a ditch. Whence then came the soil of which they are formed? It has accumulated through the action of gravity and rain-wash on the lower edge of cultivated land; the immediate cause is Nature, but the ultimate cause is man.
These shelves and banks have many local names; that which is, I think, most generally adopted is “lynchets.” There are two kinds which are not contemporary and which belong to two radically distinct systems of agriculture. The first kind is that which has just been described, arranged in chess-board fashion. This kind I shall, in anticipation, call the Celtic type. It is with the Celtic type that we shall be principally concerned to-night. The later Saxon type which succeeded will be briefly described later. (Crawford 342)
Several decades after Crawford made these remarks at a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, the technique of radiocarbon dating was developed. It inevitably worked its usual magic, turning Celtic artifacts into pre-Celtic artifacts and teleporting them thousands of years back in time. Fields laid out and farmed by the Celts in Classical times were now ascribed to fictitious Bronze Age cultures from God knows where.
Summary
In my opinion, Andrew Whitefield’s silent ambush is not radical enough. The age of the Céide Fields has been overestimated by Séamus Caulfield by at least three thousand years and by Andrew Whitefield by at least one thousand years.
- The Céide Fields were created and cultivated by the Celts sometime between 500 BCE and 500 CE.
- The local forests were cleared with metallic implements.
- The Céide Fields were predominantly arable fields, ploughed with metal colters.
- The Céide Fields were abandoned in the 6th century in the wake of the Mortalitas magna
- The Céide Fields are not the World’s oldest field system—they do not come even close.
Epilogue
The Irish poet Seamus Heaney visited Patrick Caulfield in 1974. He did not see the Céide Fields as something dead and vanished from the contemporary Irish landscape:
A landscape fossilized,
Its stone wall patternings
Repeated before our eyes
In the stone walls of Mayo.
–Heaney, Belderg 16-19
References
- Séamus Caulfield, R G O’Donnell, P I Mitchell, 14C Dating of a Neolithic Field System at Céide Fields, County Mayo, Ireland, Radiocarbon, Volume 40, Issue 2, pp 629-640, University of Arizona, Tucson AZ (1998)
- O G S Crawford, Air Survey and Archaeology, The Geographical Journal, Volume 61, Number 5, pp 342-366, London (1923)
- Patrick S Dinneen, An Irish-English Dictionary, M H Gill & Son Ltd, Dublin (1927)
- John Faulkner, Robert Thompson (editors), The Natural History of Ulster, National Museums Northern Ireland, Hollywood, County Down (2011)
- Séamus Heaney, Belderg, North, Faber and Faber, London (1975)
- William M Hennessy (translator, editor), Annals of Ulster: A Chronicle of Irish Affairs from AD 431 to AD 1540, Volume I, Alexander Thom & Co, Dublin (1887)
- Karen Molloy, Michael O’Connell, Palaeoecological Investigations towards the Reconstruction of Environment and Land-use Changes during Prehistory at Céide Fields, Western Ireland, Probleme der Küstenforschung im südlichen Nordseegebiet, Band 23, pp 187–225, Isensee Verlag, Oldenburg (1995)
- Andrew Whitefield, Neolithic “Celtic” Fields? A Reinterpretation of the Chronological Evidence from Céide Fields in North-Western Ireland, European Journal of Archaeology, Volume 20, Issue 2, May 2017, pp 257-279, European Association of Archaeologists, Cambridge (2017)
Image Credits
- The Céide Fields, County Mayo: © Office of Public Works, Fair Use
- Séamus Caulfield: © Copyright 2014 by © Contributor(s) and Castlebar Web Pages 1997 – 2017, Fair Use
- The Céide Fields Visitor Centre: © 2016 Mayo Ireland Ltd, Fair Use
- Ladder Fields on Lurigethan Mountain, County Antrim: © Paddy’s Wagon, Fair Use
- Map of the Céide Fields: Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain
- Plan of the Céide Fields: © Arizona Board of Regents, Fair Use
- Mayo Cliffs: This photo of Céide Fields is courtesy of TripAdvisor
- Behy Court tomb: © Anthony Weir, Fair Use
- Dún Briste Sea Stack: © 2016 Mayo Ireland Ltd, Fair Use
*O G S crawford: Wikipedia, © Keble College, Oxford, Fair Use - Seamus Heaney: Wikimedia Commons, © SiGarb, Creative Commons
That Ceide fields reminds me of a cartoon named Heidi, where the fields are green, the wind is great and the scenery is great from a distance. Plus the cliffshot was very outstanding in photography.