Earthwork, Davros, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ritual/Ceremonial
In the low-lying, damp pasture at Davros in County Mayo, a cartographer once drew something that no longer appears to exist.
On the 1915 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a careful arc of hachuring, roughly twenty metres in diameter and curving from south to north-east, suggests the western half of what may once have been a circular enclosure. A linear feature extends a further sixty-five metres to the west from its southern end. The same area appears on earlier map editions without any such markings, which means whatever prompted the 1915 surveyor to record it either emerged, was noticed, or was interpreted differently in the intervening decades.
When viewed at ground level today, the hachured arc has left no visible trace. What does survive is the linear rock feature, which turns out to be a raised seam of limestone bedrock running east to west. Along its length there is considerable evidence of past quarrying, the kind of small-scale extraction that was once commonplace across the west of Ireland wherever workable stone came close to the surface. The result is uneven, pockmarked ground, with mounds and hollows punctuated by exposed vertical and horizontal planes of limestone. Along the top of this bedrock ridge, remnants of a field boundary survive, part earthen bank and part stone walling. At least three further boundaries extend southward from it at right angles, the ghost of an agricultural layout whose working life is long over. Whether the 1915 surveyor was recording a genuine earthwork enclosure, a misread natural formation, or something that has since been entirely obliterated by quarrying activity, cannot now be determined. The landscape holds the question without resolving it.