Enclosure, Lisduvoge, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Lisduvoge, Co. Mayo

Something that once existed at Lisduvoge, in the low pastureland beside Lough Conn, is now entirely gone.

A circular earthen enclosure, roughly 25 to 30 metres across, appeared clearly on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838, its bank distinct enough to be recorded with some precision. By the time the map was revised in 1930, the shape had changed, or at least the cartographers read it differently: now it appeared D-shaped, its straight edge running along a field boundary to the south. Then, sometime in the mid-1990s, it was levelled. The slight north-south rise in the ground on which it sat, just 100 metres from the western shore of Lough Conn, is all that physically remains of the spot.

Enclosures of this kind, circular or sub-circular earthworks defined by a raised bank, are common features of the Irish landscape and are generally associated with early medieval settlement, though they range widely in date and function. What makes the Lisduvoge example quietly interesting is the documentary gap between 1838 and 1930: the change in recorded shape from circular to D-shaped likely reflects either genuine alteration to the earthwork over those intervening decades, or differences in how the two survey teams interpreted what they found on the ground. A second enclosure survives approximately 135 metres to the north-north-east, which suggests this part of Lough Conn's eastern shore once held a cluster of activity rather than a single isolated feature. The destroyed enclosure leaves that pattern incomplete.

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Pete F
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