Enclosure, Balloor, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Balloor, Co. Mayo

In the pastureland near Balloor in County Mayo, there is an archaeological site that no one can see.

A circular enclosure roughly 35 metres across lies completely levelled beneath the grass, its existence known only because a camera mounted in an aircraft caught the right field on the right dry summer day, when the buried remains caused the crops above them to grow unevenly and betray what lay below. That telltale discolouration, a cropmark, is how a great many vanished Irish sites first re-enter the record, visible for perhaps a few weeks a year and invisible the rest of the time.

The enclosure was documented as part of an archaeological survey of the Ballinrobe district, covering the areas around Lough Mask and Lough Carra, compiled by D. Lavelle and published in 1994. Circular enclosures of this type are among the most common prehistoric and early medieval monument forms in Ireland, and they appear in an enormous variety of contexts, from ring forts used as farmsteads to ceremonial or burial enclosures. Without excavation, it is rarely possible to say with certainty what any individual example was used for. At roughly 35 metres in maximum diameter, this one falls within a plausible range for a small ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead that would have been a typical unit of rural life in early medieval Ireland, though that identification remains speculative here.

There is nothing to see at ground level, and no visitor detail to offer. The site exists, in any practical sense, only in the aerial photograph that first revealed it and in the survey that recorded it afterwards.

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Pete F
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