Enclosure, Barnacahoge, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Barnacahoge, Co. Mayo

On a ridge above the bogs and rough pasture of Barnacahoge in County Mayo, there is a site that exists now only on paper.

A circular enclosure roughly 25 metres in diameter was recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838, one of the most detailed cartographic exercises ever carried out in Ireland, but it does not appear on any later edition, and there is nothing visible at ground level today. The place is, in the most literal sense, a ghost: present in the historical record, absent from the land.

Circular enclosures of this kind are a familiar feature of the Irish landscape, ranging from prehistoric ringforts used as defended farmsteads to early medieval ecclesiastical enclosures. What this particular example was, and when it was built, is unknown. By the time the nineteenth-century surveyors came through and committed it to their maps, it was presumably still legible as a feature, perhaps a low earthen bank or a slight rise in the ground. Sometime after 1838, whatever remained disappeared, absorbed back into the pasture and bog that surround it on all sides.

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Pete F
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