Enclosure, Carrowgowan, Co. Mayo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Carrowgowan, Co. Mayo

In the rough pasture of Carrowgowan, on a low slope facing south-east across a stretch of damp lowland, there may or may not be a ringfort.

That ambiguity is precisely the point. A ringfort is a roughly circular earthen or stone enclosure, typically dating from the early medieval period, used as a farmstead or place of shelter. They are common enough across Ireland that thousands remain mapped and recorded. What is less common is one that has effectively vanished behind a wall of thorns.

The enclosure appears clearly on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, drawn as a circular feature approximately 25 metres in diameter, consistent in scale with a typical ringfort. By later map editions, it is gone from the record entirely, whether because surveyors judged it too degraded to mark, or simply overlooked it, is unknown. When the site was visited in 1998, the reason for the difficulty became apparent: a dense thicket of blackthorn, itself ranging between 20 and 30 metres across, had colonised the location so thoroughly that no physical inspection of what lay beneath was possible. A field boundary running on a roughly north-west to south-east axis also crosses the area, further complicating any reading of the ground. The enclosure has not been confirmed, measured, or described in any meaningful way since it was first mapped nearly two centuries ago. It remains, in the most literal sense, unexamined.

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Pete F
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