Enclosure, Cloonaghboy, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Cloonaghboy, Co. Mayo

Something about this modest rise in a County Mayo pasture slipped through the cracks of the mapping process.

The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1837 recorded a circular embanked enclosure here at Cloonaghboy, measuring somewhere between twenty and twenty-five metres across, its earthen bank clearly legible enough to a surveyor to warrant marking down. By the time later map editions came to be produced, it had disappeared from the record entirely, not because it was gone, but because it had apparently ceased to be considered worth noting. The ground itself has not forgotten it.

What survives today is a grass-covered, roughly circular raised area, somewhat reduced from its originally recorded dimensions, running about 17.6 metres on the northwest to southeast axis and around fifteen metres northeast to southwest. The enclosure's definition varies around its circuit. To the northwest and north-northwest, a scarp or slope nearly two metres high and six and a half metres wide marks the edge, though it merges gradually into the natural rise of the ground rather than standing apart from it. To the northeast and southwest, a lower scarp of around 0.9 metres still reads in the landscape. On the western side, a quarry pit roughly six metres across has cut into the monument, truncating it and removing whatever profile once existed there. Enclosures of this general type, roughly circular earthen boundaries that may once have defined a farmstead, a seasonal settlement, or a place of some local significance, are found widely across Irish landscapes, often surviving only as faint humps in permanent pasture where the plough has never reached. A second enclosure of the same broad class lies just eighty metres to the southwest, which suggests this corner of Cloonaghboy held some sustained human interest across the centuries, even if the precise nature of that interest is no longer recoverable.

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Pete F
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