Enclosure, Davros, Co. Mayo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Davros, Co. Mayo

Something in a low-lying pasture at Davros in County Mayo quietly refuses to make up its mind about what it is.

The earthwork here sits in level farmland, its shape neither wholly circular nor wholly rectangular, and that ambiguity is precisely what makes it interesting. A modern field fence cuts across its north-western end, and the surrounding fosse, the shallow defensive ditch that once defined the outer edge, has been largely infilled, surviving now only as a gentle depression in the ground. A pronounced slump on the eastern side may be all that remains of an original entrance causeway, perhaps four metres wide.

The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map records the site as a roughly circular enclosure, between 45 and 50 metres in diameter, but it disappears from later map editions entirely, suggesting it had already suffered considerable levelling by the mid-nineteenth century. What survives on the ground is an oblong earthen platform, defined by a broadly sloping scarp that is more substantial on the eastern side than the western. The northern arc of that scarp is clearly curvilinear in plan, consistent with a rath, the term used for the circular or oval earthen enclosures that served as enclosed farmsteads across Ireland from roughly the early medieval period. But the southern sides are noticeably linear, with squared-off corners at the south-east and south-west, which raises the separate possibility of a moated site, a later medieval form of enclosed settlement typically associated with Anglo-Norman colonisation, where a roughly rectangular platform was surrounded by a water-filled ditch. The current thinking leans towards a rath that was modified and partly levelled at some point in the past, its original circular form gradually pulled into something more angular by later use or agricultural interference, though the question cannot be settled from surface evidence alone.

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