Enclosure, Kilquire, Co. Mayo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Kilquire, Co. Mayo

In a field in Kilquire, County Mayo, there is nothing left to see, and that absence is itself the point.

An enclosure that once measured roughly 35 to 40 metres across, and which may have been a ringfort, was levelled during land reclamation and has since been absorbed into the surrounding field system. The only evidence that it ever existed comes from aerial photographs taken in 1970.

Those photographs, part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography, show a subcircular enclosure with a rectangular house in its north-western quadrant and a series of subrectangular field plots pressing in from the north and north-east. A ringfort, to give the form some context, is a roughly circular earthwork enclosure used as a farmstead in early medieval Ireland, typically defended by one or more banks and ditches. Thousands survive across the country, but many more have been lost to exactly the kind of land improvement recorded here. The levelling of this one is noted by Lavelle in 1994, who catalogued it among a broader survey of sites. By that point the earthworks were already gone; the aerial record was all that remained of the original shape.

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Pete F
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