Enclosure, Craggy, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
On the rough terrain of Craggy in County Mayo, there is a recorded enclosure that exists, for now, more as a placeholder than a place.
It has been catalogued, given a monument record, and noted on official maps, yet the details that would tell us what it actually is, who built it, and when, remain unpublished. The site sits in a kind of documentary limbo, officially acknowledged but not yet described.
Enclosures in the Irish archaeological record can mean many things. Some are the low, circular earthen banks of a ringfort, a farmstead type common from the early medieval period roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Others are the stone-walled remains of a cashel, a cattle enclosure, or something older still. The townland name Craggy points to rocky ground, the kind of landscape in Mayo where stone walls survive well but can be hard to date without excavation or close survey. Without the underlying record being available, it is not possible to say which category this enclosure falls into, or whether it has been properly examined at ground level at all.