Enclosure, Ellagh More, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ellagh More, Co. Mayo

In the pasture land of Ellagh More in County Mayo, a circular enclosure is disappearing into the landscape by degrees, and has been doing so for at least a century and a half.

What survives is roughly half a ring, a curving stone bank and scarp tracing an arc from south-southwest to north-northeast, about twenty metres across, with the eastern half completely levelled and no longer visible at ground level. It is the kind of site that rewards close attention precisely because it asks you to reconstruct what is no longer there.

The enclosure was already losing ground when the Ordnance Survey mapped it in 1838, at which point it appeared as a complete circular feature, slightly clipped on its southern edge by a field boundary running east to west. By the 1922 edition of the OS map, cartographers were depicting it as a semicircular hachured area, the northern arc folded into another east-west field wall. That wall, it seems, preserved the curve of the original bank even as it absorbed it. What remains today is a stone bank some 3.4 metres wide, rising about 0.8 metres on the interior and 1.5 metres on the exterior, built from a loose arrangement of stones and boulders, partly covered in sod, and heavily screened by blackthorn and hazel scrub. On the western side, the bank coincides with a natural fall of ground, suggesting whoever built it was working with the existing topography rather than against it. A stream runs about 150 metres to the south. Circular embanked enclosures of this kind are found across Ireland and are often associated with early medieval settlement, serving as boundaries for a farmstead or small defended residence, though the precise date and function of this particular example are not recorded.

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