Enclosure, Carrowgarve, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Carrowgarve, Co. Mayo

In the low pastureland of Carrowgarve, a modest rise in the ground conceals what was once a roughly circular enclosure, roughly twenty metres across, now so absorbed into the surrounding field system that most of it has simply ceased to exist.

What survives is essentially half a monument: the western arc of an earth and stone bank, three to four metres wide and rising to about two metres on its outer face, its bulk reinforced with large stones. The rest of the enclosing bank has been removed entirely, folded into the agricultural landscape over generations, the northeast and southwest sections long since pressed into service as ordinary field boundaries.

Ordnance Survey maps from 1838 and 1922 both record the structure as a subcircular enclosure, which places its visible presence in the landscape across at least a century of cartographic memory, even as the monument itself was being gradually dismantled. Enclosures of this kind, typically interpreted as the remains of early medieval ringforts or related settlement features, were once common across Ireland; a ringfort is a farmstead enclosed by one or more earthen or stone banks, used roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. In Carrowgarve, the interior surface is still noticeably stony and disturbed in character, suggesting that the ground within the former enclosure has been worked or disturbed at some point, though precisely when or how is not recorded. The Deel River runs about a hundred metres to the south, marking the townland boundary, and the gentle fall of the land towards it gives the site a quiet, slightly set-apart quality even now.

The most telling detail about this place may be its local name. Residents have long referred to it as a 'garden field', a phrase that carries a suggestion of enclosure and cultivation without quite explaining either. It is a name that acknowledges the ground is different here, even if the reason has been largely forgotten.

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Pete F
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