Carrigeenamoe, Lough Carra, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Settlement Sites
Lough Carra, in County Mayo, is one of the few marl lakes in Ireland, its waters rendered a distinctive milky turquoise by dissolved calcium carbonate, a quality that sets it apart visually from almost every other lake on the island.
Within and around it lie scattered islands, promontories, and submerged features that have drawn human attention for millennia. Carrigeenamoe is one such place, a name that translates roughly from the Irish as the little rock of the plain, sitting quietly within this unusual lacustrine landscape without much in the way of public record to explain what it is or was.
Lough Carra itself has genuine archaeological depth. The lake and its margins have yielded evidence of prehistoric settlement, and the wider area is associated with crannogs, the artificial or partially artificial islands built on lake margins and used as defensible homesteads from the Bronze Age through the early medieval period. The lake's exceptionally clear, lime-rich water has preserved organic materials at a number of sites that would have decayed elsewhere. George Moore, the novelist, grew up nearby at Moore Hall, and writers and naturalists have paid attention to Carra for centuries, drawn by its clarity and the pale, almost luminous quality of its bed. Carrigeenamoe fits into this broader pattern of named features around the lake, each carrying some layer of historical or topographical significance, though the particulars of this site remain, for now, largely unrecorded in any accessible public form.
The lake is accessible from several points in the area, and the shoreline rewards a slow approach on foot, particularly where the water is shallow enough to reveal the characteristic pale marl beneath. The names of small rocks, points, and inlets around Carra tend to preserve older Irish placename layers that have disappeared elsewhere, and Carrigeenamoe is worth noting as part of that quiet, ongoing geography.
