Enclosure, Corrahoor, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
There is a site in Corrahoor, County Mayo, that exists more convincingly on paper than it does in the ground.
A circular embanked enclosure, roughly twenty metres across, was recorded by the Ordnance Survey in 1838 and duly marked on their six-inch map. By the time later editions were produced, it had been quietly dropped. Visit the field today and there is nothing to see at all, just pasture on rising ground, the land falling away to the east and south-east.
The 1838 OS six-inch mapping was among the most detailed and systematic surveys of the Irish landscape ever attempted, and the surveyors were generally careful about what they chose to record. An embanked enclosure of this kind, a roughly circular earthwork defined by a raised bank, would typically have been understood as a remnant of early settlement or land use, related to the class of monument more commonly known as a ringfort. That the feature appeared clearly enough to be plotted in 1838, and then vanished from subsequent maps without explanation, suggests it was either levelled in the intervening years, perhaps during agricultural improvement or land clearance, or that it had already degraded to a point where later surveyors judged it too faint to warrant inclusion. Either way, the ground has since closed over it entirely.