Enclosure, Carrickmacantire, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
On a gently sloping pasture at the south-western edge of a broad, flat-topped ridge in Carrickmacantire, there is a small circular earthwork so faint that it never made it onto any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps.
That absence alone is telling. The OS six-inch series, produced from the 1830s onwards, was extraordinarily thorough in recording field monuments across Ireland, so anything it missed was either already too eroded to notice or simply overlooked in a quiet corner of Mayo.
What survives today is a subcircular outline, roughly eight metres north to south and eight and a half metres east to west, defined by a low, sod-covered stony bank. The bank is modest at its tallest, rising to around 0.45 metres on the downslope southern side, and narrows to just 0.7 metres wide. On the western side there is a broad gap of nearly five metres, which may represent an original entrance, though the enclosure is too poorly preserved to say with confidence. In the south-western quadrant, a slight scarp curves inward from that gap, enclosing a shallow sunken area, perhaps three to four metres across and only fifteen to twenty centimetres deep. The interior is not noticeably raised above the surrounding ground, which rules out nothing and confirms nothing. Whether this was a small agricultural enclosure, a stock pen, a domestic site, or something else entirely remains genuinely uncertain. About 260 metres to the south-south-west sits a rath, the type of circular earthen enclosure most commonly associated with early medieval farmsteads in Ireland, and the proximity of the two features is suggestive, even if the relationship between them is unclear.