About

This website is named after the image above, The Front Field. This picture is the view from our front door, looking out onto the land. The field’s name is over 100 years old. The previous Irish name for the field is lost and prior to the building of the house in the 1850_s, it would have been bigger as it would have included the footprint of the current house and yard. It is situated in Lissaclarig in the Barony of West Carbery West Division. The field is about two acres in area. Before the 20^th century, it consisted of three fields with a stone and sod ditch or fence running from where the dwelling house sits to the site of the oak tree.

How old is the front field? As a cultivated piece of land, it is probably at least 2,000 years old. Some of the ditches that enclose this space are likely to have been laid out in the 18^th century ¹. The first ordnance survey in the 1830_s records the ditches largely as they are today. The ditches are a living monument to the past and will have been looked at and worked on by at least six generations of people and possibly a lot more.

Many of the people around have been in this townland since the 1700_s. Together with two or three other families, they have been the custodians of this place for around 350 years.

Before that time there were other people, some may have been connected with the current occupants but the records for ordinary people in Ireland don’t allow us to say with any certainty.

We have a fair idea of who owned this place back until the 1500_s and a reasonable idea of who might have owned it for the four centuries preceding that time.

Previous to that things become much more speculative, there are field monuments in the townland and in adjacent townlands which make it possible to construct a plausible picture for life in this place during the second half of the first millennium. And before that we are in even hazier times with no more that the occasional physical remnant of the full and real lives that people lived in this place.

With this website, I hope to closely study place over time, writing from the perspective of people who are of the place. This field is a diving off point for studies into local place names, land ownership over history, the architecture of ordinary people’s homes and farms, changing agricultural practices over time, field monuments and local archaeology.