Enclosure, Ballinlag, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballinlag, Co. Mayo

On a southwest-facing slope in County Mayo, there is almost nothing left to see, and that is precisely what makes this site worth knowing about.

A low, level patch of ground in the middle of pasture, bordered on one side by an overgrown field wall, is all that remains of what was once a clearly defined oval enclosure, roughly 35 to 40 metres north to south and 20 to 25 metres east to west. The structure has been levelled, and the faint outline of a flattened area, somewhat narrower now than the original, is the only physical trace that anything deliberate ever stood here.

Enclosures of this kind, most commonly earthen ringforts or the remains of similar enclosed settlements, were once an ordinary feature of the Irish countryside, numbering in the tens of thousands. This particular example appears on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1838, which records it sitting on a broad terrace overlooking a valley of boggy pasture to the south and west. Something of its former boundary survives in the landscape in an unexpected way: the townland boundary, the administrative line dividing Ballinlag from its neighbours, was drawn to follow the eastern arc of the enclosure exactly. By the time the revised Ordnance Survey edition was published in 1931, the enclosure itself had been removed from the map, presumably because it had by then already been cleared or reduced to nothing. The townland boundary, however, remained, preserving the ghost of the enclosure's curve in the invisible geometry of land ownership long after the earthwork itself had gone.

The site sits on rising ground with higher land to the northeast, and the terrace position would have given its original occupants a clear outlook across the lower boggy ground to the west. Visitors to the area will find little to examine on the surface, but the overgrown field wall along the eastern edge of the level area is a quiet reminder that some boundaries, once drawn, have a way of persisting.

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Pete F
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