Enclosure, Behy Beg, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Behy Beg, Co. Mayo

In the improved pasture of Behy Beg, a small circular enclosure once existed that has since vanished so thoroughly from the landscape that nothing remains above ground to mark it.

What makes it quietly peculiar is the gap in the cartographic record: the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1837 to 1838, usually a reliable witness to earthworks of this kind, shows no sign of it at all.

By the time the 1922 edition of the OS map was produced, the enclosure had been recorded as a roughly circular feature approximately fifteen metres in diameter, indicated by a double ring of hachuring, the fine radiating lines surveyors used to suggest the rise and fall of an earthen bank or boundary. The northern edge of whatever structure this was had already been clipped by a road at that point. Whether the feature was simply missed by the earlier surveyors, or whether it emerged into visibility, or was noted for the first time, between the two mapping campaigns is not known. Farm buildings sit immediately to the south-east of the site today, and the ground has been subject to agricultural improvement, which likely accounts for why no physical trace survives at ground level.

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Pete F
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