Enclosure, Drumminaweelaun, Co. Mayo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Drumminaweelaun, Co. Mayo

At a field junction in Drumminaweelaun, County Mayo, four modern rectangular fields meet at a point that was once, in all likelihood, the centre of a circular enclosure roughly twenty metres across.

There is nothing to see there now. The earthwork was levelled at some point in the past, leaving no visible trace at ground level, and the land has long since been absorbed into ordinary pasture on elevated ground. The only surviving evidence is cartographic: the 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map records a circular feature at this location, its outline still legible even as the surrounding field boundaries were redrawn around it.

That circular outline is significant. A diameter of around twenty metres, combined with an elevated position in the landscape, is broadly consistent with a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead that was built across Ireland, primarily during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Ringforts typically consisted of a circular bank and ditch enclosing a domestic area, and they are among the most common archaeological monuments in the country, though many, like this one, have been lost to agriculture. Morahan, writing in 2001, noted the site's probable identity while acknowledging that the levelling makes any firm conclusion difficult. What can be said with confidence is that by the time the first detailed Ordnance Survey maps were being made in the 1830s, the feature was already old enough and distinct enough to be worth recording, and that sometime after that, it disappeared entirely from the ground while persisting, quietly, on paper.

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Pete F
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