Earthwork, Kilglassan, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ritual/Ceremonial
In the townland of Kilglassan in County Mayo, an earthwork sits in the landscape, recorded and classified but largely unexamined in the public record.
Earthworks of this kind can take many forms, from the banks and ditches of early enclosures to the levelled platforms of ringforts or the remnants of field systems long abandoned, and without further documentation it is difficult to say precisely what category this one falls into or what period it belongs to. That ambiguity is itself part of what makes it worth noting.
Mayo's landscape is dense with such features, many of them surviving simply because the land around them was never intensively developed. The county saw significant population loss during the nineteenth century, and that, combined with the persistence of small-scale farming, left a great many ancient earthworks intact in pasture fields and rough ground. Whether this particular example is prehistoric, early medieval, or something later is a question the physical remains would need to answer directly.