Earthwork, Dromada, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ritual/Ceremonial
In the townland of Dromada in County Mayo, an earthwork sits in the landscape, recorded, classified, and assigned a monument number, yet almost entirely undescribed in any publicly accessible form.
It is the kind of entry that appears on archaeological maps as a dot with a label, suggesting something significant enough to have been noted by surveyors at some point, but offering little else to the curious observer.
Earthworks is a broad category in Irish archaeology, and the term can cover a considerable range of features: the raised banks of a ringfort, the subtle platforms of a deserted settlement, the ditched enclosures associated with early medieval farmsteads, or the levelled remnants of something older still. In the west of Ireland, such features are often most legible from the air or in low winter light, when the angle of the sun picks out slight differences in ground level that would otherwise pass unnoticed. What exactly the Dromada earthwork represents, when it was constructed, and by whom, remains a matter that the formal record has not yet made clear in any available public form.