Enclosure, Boleymeelagh, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
In a gently rolling pasture in the townland of Boleymeelagh, County Mayo, there is an oval enclosure that the Ordnance Survey mapmakers never recorded.
Across every edition of the OS six-inch maps, it simply does not appear, and it came to official attention only through aerial photography. That omission alone sets it apart from the catalogued ringforts and cashels that punctuate the Irish countryside. What survives on the ground is a drystone enclosure measuring roughly 31.6 metres west-northwest to east-southeast and 42 metres northeast to southwest, its wall varying dramatically depending on where you look.
The most substantial section runs along the south-southeast to south-southwest arc, where the wall also functions as a property and townland boundary. Here it stands 1.8 metres high, roughly coursed to a width of 0.7 metres, and finished with a coping of contiguous stones set upright on edge, the whole structure apparently resting on a rough plinth of stones and boulders. Move around to the southwest-to-east-northeast stretch, however, and the same enclosing wall diminishes to a low, sod-covered stone bank, barely 0.4 to 0.6 metres high and spread to a width of 3.4 metres, suggesting collapse or deliberate robbing of stone over time. A gap of roughly ten metres opens at the north-northeast, possibly an original entrance. The interior is not raised above the surrounding ground, which is uneven and scattered with stone, a surface that offers no easy reading of what the space was once used for.
Immediately to the north and northeast, the ground tells a separate story. An area of roughly 20 to 25 metres across shows hollows and exposed seams of limestone consistent with small-scale quarrying, the kind of extraction that would have supplied raw material for walls and buildings throughout the locality. Near the northern edge of this disturbed zone sits a poorly defined rectangular feature, approximately ten metres east to west and five metres north to south, thought to be the remnants of an eighteenth or nineteenth-century house. Whether the quarrying and the house are connected to the enclosure, or simply later activity that accumulated around an already ancient boundary, remains an open question.