Enclosure, Carrowcrom, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
In the pasture at Carrowcrom, on a gentle south-east-facing slope in County Mayo, there is an enclosure that no longer exists.
It cannot be seen, walked around, or photographed. The ground gives nothing away. What remains is essentially a cartographic ghost: a walled enclosure of roughly thirty metres in diameter, sub-circular or polygonal in shape, recorded on the 1922 edition of the Ordnance Survey map and then erased from the landscape during land reclamation sometime after that survey was made.
The 1838 OS six-inch map, the great baseline document of nineteenth-century Irish topography, shows no trace of the enclosure at all, which raises its own questions. Enclosures of this kind are often the remains of early medieval ringforts, the farmsteads of Gaelic Ireland, typically consisting of a circular earthen bank or stone wall enclosing a domestic area. The 1922 map records not only the wall itself but an arc of hachuring on the eastern side, the cartographic convention used to indicate a bank or raised feature in the ground. Whether the enclosure was already ruinous by 1922, or still reasonably intact, is unclear. What is certain is that subsequent land reclamation levelled it entirely. One neighbouring feature survives: a standing stone sits approximately 140 metres to the north, its presence perhaps the only above-ground reminder that this corner of Mayo was once marked out and occupied in ways the current pasture does not suggest.