Earthwork, Attinaskollia, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Earthwork, Attinaskollia, Co. Mayo

In the townland of Attinaskollia in County Mayo, an earthwork sits in the landscape, recognised as a protected monument but largely unknown beyond that designation.

Earthworks of this kind are among the most common and least discussed features of the Irish countryside. They might represent the remains of a ringfort, a burial mound, a field boundary of considerable age, or any number of other structures that people built, used, and eventually abandoned across several thousand years of settlement. The category is broad almost by definition, and that breadth is part of what makes individual examples easy to overlook.

Attinaskollia itself is a small townland, one of many that tile the map of Mayo in units that preserve, in their names, traces of older Irish-language descriptions of land and place. The earthwork there has been recorded as a monument, which means it has come to the attention of surveyors at some point and been judged significant enough to protect, but the detail of what it consists of, when it was made, and by whom, remains formally undocumented in any publicly accessible form at present.

What can be said is that Mayo has a dense and varied archaeological landscape, ranging from megalithic tombs on the Céide Fields plateau to medieval tower houses and early Christian enclosures. An earthwork in this county could belong to almost any period from the Neolithic onward. Without further investigation, the monument at Attinaskollia is, for now, a shape in the ground waiting for a fuller account.

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