Enclosure, Ballynabrehon, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballynabrehon, Co. Mayo

Some sites exist only on paper, and this one in Ballynabrehon, County Mayo, has not even managed to hold onto that.

A broadly oval embanked enclosure, somewhere between twenty and twenty-five metres in diameter, appears clearly on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, mapped and recorded by surveyors who walked the ground and noted what they found. By the time later map editions were produced, it had been dropped entirely. Today, standing in the pasture on the low ridge where it once sat, there is nothing to see at all.

Embanked enclosures of this kind are a familiar feature of the Irish countryside in older cartographic records. They are typically earthwork enclosures defined by a raised bank, sometimes the remains of a ringfort or an earlier field boundary, sometimes a farmstead enclosure of medieval or early modern date. Whether this one was ever substantial enough to leave a lasting mark on the land, or whether it was already reduced to near nothing by the time the 1838 surveyors passed through, is impossible to say now. The farmyard that sits immediately to the south may well have absorbed whatever earthwork survived. Ground disturbance, field drainage, and the quiet work of livestock over many generations can erase a low bank entirely, leaving only a cartographic ghost behind.

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Pete F
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