Enclosure, Brownstown, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Brownstown, Co. Mayo

On the small peninsula known as Rinneen, near Brownstown in County Mayo, there is nothing left to see, and that absence is precisely what makes the place worth knowing about.

The ground is pasture now, gently sloping to the north-east, and whatever once stood here has been levelled so thoroughly that no surface trace remains. Yet the Ordnance Survey map of 1838 recorded a circular enclosure on this spot, clear enough that a surveyor thought it worth marking.

The site is identified as a possible ringfort, the most common type of early medieval settlement in Ireland. Ringforts, typically circular areas enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, were used as farmsteads from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, and tens of thousands of them are scattered across the Irish landscape. Many have been ploughed out or built over, surviving only as crop marks or old map notations. This one on Rinneen fits that pattern. By the time any modern archaeological record was compiled, the enclosure had already gone, its existence preserved mainly because the nineteenth-century surveyors caught it before it disappeared entirely.

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