Enclosure, Ballyvicmaha, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyvicmaha, Co. Mayo

In a gently undulating stretch of Mayo pasture, a roughly circular arrangement of stones sits on a low rise, its original purpose long since blurred by time and subsequent land use.

What survives is a spread of partly sod-covered rubble forming a bank about six metres wide, with an internal and external height of around one metre. At the north-north-west, a short run of drystone walling is still visible on the inner face, which suggests the bank is not a bank at all in origin, but rather the collapsed remains of a substantial stone wall that once stood considerably higher. A gap of just under four metres in the northern side likely marks the original entrance.

The enclosure measures twenty-one metres across in both directions, making it a fairly modest but coherent space. At some point after it fell out of its original use, it was absorbed into a later field system. One field wall, running roughly east to west, cuts directly through the southern half of the interior, dividing a space that was presumably once unified. Two other walls that had intersected the enclosure at the north and south have since been removed, leaving the later reorganisation of the landscape only partly legible. The perimeter is now fringed with hawthorn and scrub, which gives the structure a degree of visual definition it might otherwise lack from a distance. Some one hundred and sixty metres to the south-west lie a rath and a children's burial ground. A rath is a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead that was common across Ireland during the early medieval period, typically consisting of an earthen bank surrounding a habitation area. The clustering of these three features in relatively close proximity points to a landscape that saw sustained, layered activity across different periods, though the enclosure's own date and function remain unspecified.

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Pete F
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