Embanked enclosure, Cloonakillina, Co. Mayo

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Enclosures

Embanked enclosure, Cloonakillina, Co. Mayo

On the highest ridge for some distance around in County Mayo, sitting at 339 feet above sea level and ringed by wide stretches of bog, there is a small embanked enclosure that has been quietly shrinking for the better part of two centuries.

What was recorded on the Ordnance Survey's 1838 six-inch map as a subrectangular earthwork measuring roughly 25 metres by 18 metres had, by the 1920 edition of the same map, been reduced to a subcircular area of around 15 metres in diameter, clipped on its north-eastern side by a field boundary. On the ground today it reads as a slightly raised circular platform, approximately 14 metres east to west and 13 metres north to south, defined by a low scarp that reaches about 0.8 metres in height on its southern side, with a faintly raised internal rim still visible around the edge of the level, grassy interior.

An embanked enclosure of this kind is a broad category in Irish archaeology, a term covering earthworks defined by a built-up bank or scarp rather than a dug ditch, and examples range in date and function from prehistoric to early medieval. What is particular about this one is its position. It commands excellent views in every direction and looks out over Cloonakillina Lough, situated roughly 280 metres to the south-west, with bog spreading away from the base of the ridge on all sides. That combination, a commanding elevated site, deliberate enclosure, and prominent isolation in the landscape, tends to suggest something more than a practical agricultural origin, though the site has not been excavated and its date and purpose remain unknown. The field boundary that clips its north-eastern edge has gradually eroded the earthwork's original form, obscuring whatever shape it once presented to the surrounding terrain.

Inside the enclosure, a hawthorn tree grows in the northern half, and at its base is a small, loose heap of stones, two to three metres across, partly buried under brambles. The hawthorn is a tree with a long association in Irish tradition with sacred or liminal places, and the presence of a stone cairn beneath it, however modest, gives the interior a quietly suggestive quality that sits oddly against the otherwise plain and functional landscape of ridge-top pasture around it.

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Pete F
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