Enclosure, Carha, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Carha, Co. Mayo

On a low ridge in County Mayo, a small earthwork sits in open pasture with a wooded glen dropping away sharply to one side and undulating countryside spreading out in every direction.

What makes it quietly odd is that it no longer looks like what it once was. Ordnance Survey maps from 1838 and 1922 both record it as a circular enclosure, a shape consistent with the ringforts, or raths, that were commonly built across Ireland from the early medieval period onward as enclosed farmsteads or places of habitation. Today, the same feature has a roughly D-shaped plan, with noticeably straight edges along its northern and eastern sides.

The enclosure consists of a low, level platform measuring approximately 14 metres north to south and 15.5 metres east to west, defined by a degraded scarp, essentially a low earthen edge or bank, that still rises to around 0.9 metres on the western side, though it has worn down to roughly 0.4 metres on the east. Stones protrude along the top of this scarp, and an exposed section on the eastern side shows its interior composition: a mixture of peaty soil and stones. The platform surface itself is level but uneven, with occasional stones breaking through the sod. The straight northern and eastern sections of the scarp are thought to be the result of modern modification, meaning the circular form visible on those nineteenth- and early twentieth-century maps has been partially recut or disturbed at some point in the intervening decades. A narrow field ditch, about a metre wide, separates the northern scarp from a field fence, and just beyond that fence a section of the ridge has been quarried away for sand, a practical intervention that has brought its own kind of change to this already altered corner of the landscape.

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Pete F
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