Enclosure, Agloragh, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Agloragh, Co. Mayo

On a ridge slope in Agloragh, County Mayo, there is a site that exists almost entirely as an idea.

At ground level, the improved pasture gives nothing away; there is no earthwork, no raised edge, no hollow to suggest that anything once stood here. The only evidence for this possible enclosure is a circular cropmark, roughly 25 metres in diameter, caught in a single aerial photograph and nowhere else recorded.

Cropmarks appear when buried features alter how vegetation grows above them; the outlines of old walls, ditches, or banks can show as distinct tonal differences in grass or grain when seen from the air, even when centuries of ploughing and pasture improvement have erased every surface trace. On that basis alone, the site was entered into the Record of Monuments and Places in 1997 as a possible enclosure. It does not appear on any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, which have documented the Irish landscape in considerable detail since the nineteenth century, and the omission suggests the feature had already disappeared from view long before those surveys were carried out. The surrounding landscape adds some context: a broad expanse of bog lies 300 metres to the east, and a river curves around it to the northeast, a configuration that would have made this ridge slope a relatively sheltered and well-drained position in an otherwise wet terrain.

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Pete F
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