Enclosure, Carrowreagh, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
At some point in the early nineteenth century, a small circular earthwork in Carrowreagh was labelled simply "Pound" on a landed estate map, and that single word carries a quiet weight.
A pound was an enclosure used to impound stray livestock, typically until their owners paid a fine to retrieve them. This one, roughly circular and measuring somewhere between twenty-five and thirty metres across, appears clearly on an estate map drawn up in 1811 for Sir Robert Lynch-Blosse, its western arc folded neatly into the townland boundary as though the two features had grown together over time.
What makes the site quietly interesting is what happened to it afterwards. By the time the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch maps in 1838, the pound had disappeared from the cartographic record entirely, and it was still absent from the 1916 edition. The semi-circular curve in the townland boundary remained, drawn without comment, but whatever institutional memory had once attached the word "pound" to that curve had been lost or simply set aside. The enclosure itself survives in partial form. An earthen bank, about 1.4 metres wide and 1.4 metres high, still defines the arc from the south-east round to the north, with a field ditch running along its inner edge. The north-east to east section has fared less well, worn down to a slight curving ripple in the ground. A gate in the south-western bank opens onto a farm road that passes along the western side, and the interior is level, with no visible raising of the ground.
The site is a small example of how administrative and agricultural infrastructure could leave a physical mark on a landscape and then recede from official notice within a generation or two, surviving only as an earthwork and a boundary line that traces a curve no surveyor ever bothered to explain.