Enclosure, Bohola, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
On a north-south ridge outside Bohola in County Mayo, a circular enclosure once stood that was prominent enough to be carefully recorded by the Ordnance Survey in 1838, then quietly vanished from every subsequent map edition.
It was not that the cartographers forgot it; it had simply been levelled, absorbed back into the pasture, and in practical terms ceased to exist as a legible feature of the landscape. What remains is something the surveyor's pen can barely capture: an ephemeral outline, roughly 45 metres across, that can still be traced if conditions and light cooperate.
The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch mapping, produced during the first great systematic survey of Ireland, recorded the enclosure as a circular feature between 45 and 50 metres in diameter. Circular enclosures of this general type, often referred to as raths or ringforts, were typically built as enclosed farmsteads during the early medieval period, their banks and ditches marking out a family's living space and livestock area. Whether this particular example followed that pattern cannot be said with certainty from what survives. What the ridge does preserve, separately from the enclosure itself, are traces of cultivation ridges running on an east-west axis along the high ground, the faint corrugations of former tillage visible in the turf. The site sits with open views to the west, north, and east, with the ground dropping away towards a stream or drain about 200 metres to the east, and rising gently southward along the spine of the ridge.
The outline of the enclosure is described as ephemeral, which is a fair warning that it rewards patience and a low sun rather than a quick glance from the field gate. The cultivation ridges nearby offer a slightly more legible trace of past activity, running across the ridge top in a pattern that suggests the land here was worked intensively at some point, before reverting to the grazing pasture it remains today.