Enclosure, Baunoges, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
On a south-east-facing slope in Baunoges, County Mayo, a low earthen bank traces an almost perfect circle in the pasture, quietly marking off a space that has been set apart from the surrounding land for centuries.
The enclosure measures roughly 25 metres north to south and 29 metres east to west, making it a modest but deliberate feature, the kind that a casual walker might register only as a slight rise in the ground before the grass closes over it again.
Enclosures of this broadly circular form are among the most common archaeological monuments in the Irish landscape. They are generally understood as the remains of a rath or ringfort, an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more banks and ditches thrown up around a domestic space. The bank at Baunoges is described as partly overgrown, which is characteristic of sites that have never been ploughed out but have simply been absorbed into agricultural land over generations, grazed rather than cultivated, and so preserved in a degraded but legible state. The local area, documented in a 1994 archaeological survey of Ballinrobe and the districts around Lough Mask and Lough Carra, contains numerous such monuments, a reflection of how densely settled this part of Connacht was in the early medieval centuries.