Enclosure, Ballyholan, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyholan, Co. Mayo

On Ordnance Survey maps stretching back to 1837, a roughly circular feature at Ballyholan in County Mayo is marked in a way that suggests a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead that dots the Irish landscape in the thousands, built mostly during the early medieval period.

But whether anything of the sort actually exists here is, genuinely, an open question.

The 1837 and 1930 OS six-inch maps both show what appears to be a circular enclosure of around 40 metres in diameter, skirted by a laneway to the north. On the ground, however, the picture is more ambiguous. What is actually present is a roughly circular hillock, about 50 metres across, with a domed profile rising to a narrow peak several metres above the surrounding pasture. At its summit sits a shallow depression, measuring roughly 10 metres by 8 metres, which may be a quarry pit rather than anything of archaeological significance. Around the base of the hillock, on the northern and south-eastern sides, runs a low field bank, about 1.4 metres wide and half a metre high, edged with hawthorn. The difficulty is that a dense tangle of gorse, blackthorn, and brambles prevented any thorough inspection of the site, leaving the question of whether a genuine enclosure ever existed here firmly unresolved.

The hillock itself sits in gently undulating pasture, and the laneway that skirts its northern edge remains visible. Anyone approaching the site should be prepared for the same thick scrub that frustrated earlier investigation; the vegetation shows no sign of thinning, and the shallow depression at the summit, if reachable, is likely the most legible feature remaining.

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Pete F
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