Enclosure, Carrownteeaun, Co. Mayo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Carrownteeaun, Co. Mayo

On the east-facing slope of a ridge in Carrownteeaun, County Mayo, there is a small knoll that has spent the better part of two centuries being mistaken for something it probably is not.

Ringed by hawthorn bushes and dotted with clumps of brambles, the rounded rise sits in open pasture with clear views in most directions, a stream to the west and a stretch of wet boggy ground to the east. At roughly forty metres across, with a gently domed interior flattening to a central area of about ten to twelve metres in diameter, the feature has the proportions and bearing of a rath, the circular earthen enclosure used as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period. The trouble is, it almost certainly is not one.

The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map records the site as a tree-planted circular enclosure, suggesting that by the early nineteenth century it was already being given a degree of deliberate definition. By the 1919 edition, it appears as a penannular area, meaning a near-complete ring open on one side, formed by a field boundary on the western arc. Closer inspection of the ground reveals that a field fence has been cut into the base of the knoll and follows its natural circular contour, but this construction appears to be of relatively recent date rather than anything ancient. The current assessment is that the underlying feature is a natural knoll, enclosed in the modern era, with the circular shape owing more to the accident of topography than to any deliberate prehistoric or early medieval construction. Whether anyone ever lived on the flat summit is genuinely unknown; the possibility is acknowledged, but no definitive evidence survives to confirm it.

What makes the site quietly interesting is not what it is, but what sits beside it. Approximately forty metres to the south-west lies an actual rath, and the proximity of the two features, one confirmed, one ambiguous, on the same ridge, is the kind of detail that tends to get overlooked when a place is classified as merely a natural knoll with a fence around it. The brambles and hawthorn that now colonise the knoll give it a suitably enclosed feeling regardless of its origins.

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Pete F
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