Enclosure, Friarstown, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
On the eastern shore of Lough Conn in County Mayo, a low, slightly raised platform sits in damp pasture, its interior entirely swallowed by thorn bushes and brambles.
Whatever lies at the centre of this roughly D-shaped enclosure, measuring somewhere between twenty and twenty-five metres north to south and around eighteen metres east to west, has not been seen clearly in a very long time. The surrounding wall, sod-covered and modest in height, curves gently from the south around to the north-west before transitioning into a stone-faced scarp on the northern side. It is the kind of place that is easy to walk past without registering, except that the ground is slightly elevated, the boundary has an unmistakable intentionality to it, and something clearly shaped this patch of land long before the modern field fences arrived.
The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it as a circular embanked enclosure with a diameter of around twenty metres, and noted that its southern bank coincided exactly with the townland boundary, suggesting the feature was already old enough to have been absorbed into the administrative landscape by the time cartographers came through. By the 1930 edition, a north-south field boundary had been added along the eastern side, and it appears that the enclosure has since been truncated on both its eastern and southern edges, with straight field fences now replacing what would once have been a more continuous circuit. Enclosures of this general ringfort-like type, built as enclosed farmsteads or defensible homesteads during the early medieval period, are found across Ireland in considerable numbers, though many have been similarly reduced or obscured over the centuries. A second enclosure lies roughly 135 metres to the south-south-west, hinting that this corner of Friarstown townland may once have supported more activity than the quiet, waterlogged pasture now suggests.