Enclosure, Barnycarroll, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Barnycarroll, Co. Mayo

On a gentle rise in the pastureland of Barnycarroll in County Mayo, the ground holds the faint memory of a circular enclosure, its outline now largely absorbed into the ordinary geometry of field boundaries and fences.

What survives is fragmentary: a slightly raised, semi-circular area on the western side, roughly twenty metres across, where a low scarp is picked out by a growth of ferns and rushes. The north-eastern quadrant has almost vanished, and the south-eastern portion is disturbed and irregular, with a small sub-rectangular depression, about three metres by four and a half metres and half a metre deep, cutting into the ground. The site sits on the natural fall of the land to the south and west, the kind of elevated position that was often deliberately chosen for enclosures of this type.

The clearest evidence for what this place once was comes not from the ground itself but from a map drawn up in 1811 for Sir Robert Lynch-Blosse, a County Mayo landowner, and now held in the National Library of Ireland. On that estate map, the feature is marked plainly as a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the circular earthen enclosures that were built and occupied across Ireland primarily during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The map shows it as a roughly circular enclosure, with the townland boundary running through its centre on a north-south axis. By the time the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch maps in 1838, the rath as a discrete feature had ceased to be recorded, though a curving field boundary in the north-eastern quadrant still followed its line, as if the land had quietly absorbed the old shape into its working arrangement. The 1916 edition shows nothing at all. The townland boundary and a later east-west field fence now overlie the site, which partly explains the confusion in the south-eastern portion, where the surviving scarp does not align cleanly with the western half.

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Pete F
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