Enclosure, Lisheenielagaun, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
In a pasture field in Lisheenielagaun, County Mayo, a circular earthwork roughly 43 metres across sits on gently elevated ground with open views in every direction.
It never appeared on any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, which were produced from the mid-nineteenth century onward and are generally reliable guides to even minor field monuments. Whatever levelled or obscured it had already done its work before those surveys were made. Today the enclosure announces itself only as a barely perceptible undulation in the grass, a low scarp so faint that it reads more as a suggestion than a boundary.
The site is possibly a rath, the most common type of early medieval Irish farmstead, typically formed by one or more earthen banks enclosing a roughly circular area where a family lived and kept livestock. This example, if that is what it is, has been levelled at an unknown date, leaving only the ghost of its original form in the slight interior slope that mirrors the natural fall of the surrounding terrain. What complicates the picture, and makes the site quietly strange, is a limekiln built into its north-western edge. Limekilns, which were used to burn limestone down to quicklime for agricultural use, became widespread across rural Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The person who constructed this one either did not recognise the older earthwork beneath their feet or simply found the raised ground a convenient place to build. The kiln itself is a roofless, U-shaped sunken structure faced in stone, roughly four metres by two and a half, opening westward onto a large dug-out depression now thick with nettles and thistles. Two further enclosures are visible from the spot: one around 230 metres to the west, another, a rath, about 350 metres to the north-west, suggesting this corner of Mayo was once a more populated landscape than its present quiet would imply.