Enclosure, Brackloon, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
In the pastureland at Brackloon, Co. Mayo, there may once have been a circular enclosure sitting atop a natural rise, with a stream running along the base of the slope to the north.
The reason for the uncertainty is straightforward: the feature no longer exists, and by 1930 it had disappeared from Ordnance Survey mapping entirely. What survives is a paper trail, a few lines of local memory, and a flat field where something once stood.
The 1838 OS six-inch map records a semicircular area of hachuring, the cartographic shorthand used to suggest raised or sloping ground, curving from north to south-west across a diameter of roughly thirty to thirty-five metres, with a field fence cutting through slightly east of centre. The later twenty-five-inch plan refines the picture somewhat, showing a substantially raised area with a circular summit of around twenty-five metres across, which surveyors interpreted as possibly indicating an enclosure crowning a natural hill. Enclosures of this kind, a broad category in Irish archaeology, could have served any number of purposes across different periods, from settlement to ritual to agricultural use, and without excavation it is rarely possible to say which. What local information does record is more decisive than any map: a small gravel rise or hill occupied the site, was dug away, and was then levelled out. The land was put to pasture, and the feature was simply removed.