Enclosure, Brackloon, Co. Mayo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Brackloon, Co. Mayo

A field in Brackloon, County Mayo holds the ghost of a circle.

The circular embanked enclosure that once stood here, roughly 45 to 50 metres across, has been levelled almost entirely out of existence, and a modern house and barn now occupy its western edge. What remains is a kind of topographical memory: a faint undulation in the north-east, a barely perceptible arc of a former bank along the east and south, and a field fence in the south-west that quietly follows the curve of something much older. An aerial photograph captured the outline before it faded further, but on the ground today the enclosure survives more as an idea than a structure.

The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map records the site with some precision. At that date, a rectangular building occupied the centre of the interior, reached by an access road that breached the enclosure's western bank. The map names it plainly: R. C. Chapel. The building was orientated on a north-east to south-west axis and was likely constructed in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, a period when Catholic worship in Ireland was re-emerging into more visible, if still modest, architectural form after the restrictions of the Penal era. By the 1917 edition of the same map, both the enclosure and the chapel had disappeared from the record entirely, erased within less than eighty years. The shallow depression that now extends across the centre of the field, about 15 metres east to west and 8 metres north to south, is probably what remains of the chapel's footprint.

Local tradition adds a layer that the cartographic record does not. A slightly raised area towards the south-east of the interior, partly screened by conifers and a post-and-wire fence, is held to mark the site of an earlier church, predating the mapped chapel. The same tradition holds that burials took place here while the church was in use. Whether the circular enclosure itself is of early medieval origin, as such enclosures often are in Ireland, or something later, the site has accumulated centuries of use that its near-invisible surface now gives little indication of.

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Pete F
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