Enclosure, Trouthill, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Trouthill, Co. Mayo

On a broad, undulating ridge in Trouthill, County Mayo, there is a site that appears on two separate Ordnance Survey maps yet leaves absolutely nothing to see on the ground.

The 1837 and 1919 OS six-inch maps both record a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres in diameter, most likely a rath, the kind of earthen ringfort used as a defended farmstead or high-status residence in early medieval Ireland. By the time anyone might go looking, the enclosure has been entirely levelled, swallowed by the improved pasture that now covers the hilltop.

The ridge itself sits above the Sonnagh River, which runs approximately 180 metres to the south-west, and would once have offered commanding views over the surrounding grassland and the flat expanses of bog beyond. That elevated position, and the circular form recorded on the maps, is consistent with a rath, though the classification remains tentative. What makes the site stranger still is a possible souterrain associated with it, a souterrain being an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, often built for storage or as a place of refuge, that occasionally survives long after the earthworks above it have been erased. Whether any trace of that underground feature persists beneath the pasture is unknown.

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Pete F
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