Enclosure, Ballybrinoge, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
Something has gone quietly wrong with this field in Ballybrinoge.
What sits in the rolling grassland of County Mayo, with bog opening out to the south-east, was once a tidy circle on a map. The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres across, the kind of dimensions consistent with a rath, an early medieval earthen enclosure typically used as a farmstead or settlement. By the time later editions were drawn, that circle had been absorbed into the straight line of a field boundary, its original form already beginning to dissolve into the working landscape around it.
What remains today is a slightly raised, roughly D-shaped area, around thirty-eight metres along its north-west to south-east axis and thirty-four metres across. The straight edge on the south-west side is now a field fence, and it is along the north and north-west arc that the earthwork is most legible, where a bank still stands to an external height of about 1.4 metres before flattening into a scarp that gradually disappears towards the south. Inside, in the south-east quadrant, a low irregular bank of earth and stone curves in a shallow arc to enclose a patch of uneven, disturbed ground. This inner feature, modest in scale, appears to reflect relatively recent interference with the monument rather than any original design. The enclosure has, in other words, been worked over at least twice: once when the field boundary consumed its south-western edge, and again when something disturbed its interior.
