Enclosure, Ballykine, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
In the forestry around Ballykine in County Mayo, a near-perfect circle of stone sits quietly among the trees, its massive enclosing bank still standing to a height of nearly three metres.
That is roughly the height of a double-decker bus, which gives some sense of the effort that went into its construction. What makes this enclosure quietly anomalous is the sheer scale of the stonework relative to what it contains: a broad rubble bank, almost four metres wide, surrounding an interior space roughly fifty-five metres across, now filled largely with the kind of cleared stone typical of agricultural tidying rather than any obvious settlement remains.
Enclosures of this general type, roughly circular areas bounded by an earthen or stone bank, are a familiar feature of the Irish landscape and can date from the prehistoric period through to the early medieval centuries. They served many purposes, from the enclosure of a farmstead or ringfort to the demarcation of a ceremonial or ecclesiastical space. The bank here is described as dump construction, meaning stone was simply piled or thrown rather than carefully coursed, which tends to suggest agricultural clearance as much as deliberate fortification. A later stone field fence runs along the top of the bank on its northern side, indicating that whoever worked this land in more recent centuries found the old structure convenient to build upon. Two gaps, one to the east and one to the west, allow a track to pass straight through the enclosure, suggesting it had become a thoroughfare long before anyone thought to record it formally. The survey of Ballinrobe and its district, compiled by D. Lavelle in 1994, provides the measurements and the bare physical description that survive as the main record of the site.
The enclosure sits within forestry, which means the tree cover will shape any visit considerably. The interior clearance is visible, though the canopy and undergrowth may obscure the full circuit of the bank from ground level. The track that bisects the site east to west offers the most straightforward way into the interior.