Enclosure, Mullafarry, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Mullafarry, Co. Mayo

In the pasture at Mullafarry, a small earthen enclosure once defined a circle roughly twenty metres across.

It no longer does. The site has been levelled entirely, absorbed into the working geometry of field boundaries, and a visitor standing on the slight rise where it once sat would have no reason to suspect anything was ever there.

What makes the place quietly interesting is the paper trail that outlasts the physical evidence. The enclosure appears on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from both 1838 and 1929, recorded as a sub-circular form, the kind of modest enclosed space, defined by an earthen bank, that dots the Irish countryside in various states of survival. Such enclosures are often associated with early medieval settlement, though they could also serve agricultural or ceremonial functions. By the time the later map was drawn, the structure was already being consumed by the field system around it, its northern arc incorporated into an east-west boundary that still runs across the land today. That extant field boundary may hold within it the last physical remnant of the original bank, though there is nothing at ground level to confirm it. Local memory, at least, preserved the detail that an earthen bank once did the enclosing.

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Pete F
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