Earthwork, Falleighter, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ritual/Ceremonial
In the pasture of Falleighter, on a north-north-east-facing slope in County Mayo, there may or may not be an earthwork.
That quiet uncertainty is, in itself, a rather telling thing. Earthworks, as a category, can cover a considerable range, from prehistoric enclosures and burial mounds to the remnants of field boundaries and defensive banks. What they share is a dependence on shape and elevation, on the ground holding some memory of what was once built or dug into it. At Falleighter, even that much is in doubt.
The site was listed as an earthwork in both the 1991 and 1997 editions of the national monuments registers, but the original source of that designation is not known. When the location was visited and inspected in 1996, no visible trace of archaeological remains could be found at ground level. Whatever prompted the original record, whether an older map notation, a local account, or some feature since lost to agricultural levelling, has not been traced. The nature of any possible earthwork here remains, in the careful language of those who looked into it, very uncertain.