Enclosure, Ballydrum, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballydrum, Co. Mayo

What is left of this circular enclosure at Ballydrum is, in a sense, the outline of an absence.

Quarrying has scooped out the entire interior to a depth of more than two metres, turning what was once a raised earthwork into something closer to a pit, with only a narrow arc of the original boundary still standing to mark what was there. The remaining scarp, running along the north-east to south arc, rises roughly a metre above the quarried floor and is faced on its outer side with stone; below it, the slope of the natural rise has been cut so sharply that it drops nearly another two metres in an almost vertical face. A further short arc survives at the west, though it is largely hidden beneath vegetation.

The enclosure was recorded on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from both 1837 and 1919 as a roughly circular form, somewhere between twenty and twenty-five metres in diameter, with part of its perimeter already absorbed into a field boundary along the north-east to south side. Enclosures of this general type, often referred to as ring forts or raths, were among the most common settlement forms in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a raised bank and sometimes a ditch enclosing a domestic or agricultural space. Whether this example was ever a settlement, a stock enclosure, or something else is now difficult to say, since the quarrying has removed whatever archaeology once lay within. A second enclosure of the same type sits just twenty metres to the east, on the same rise, suggesting the area carried some significance over a long period.

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