Enclosure, Carrowkeel, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
In a rough, wet field in Carrowkeel, County Mayo, the most conspicuous sign of an ancient enclosure is a patch of short green grass.
Surrounded by rushes, it sits on a low rise like a small dry island in a boggy sea, its tidiness the only clue that something deliberate once stood here.
The site appears clearly on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, recorded as a circular embanked enclosure roughly twenty metres in diameter. An embanked enclosure of this kind typically consisted of a raised earthen bank defining a circular boundary, a form found widely across Ireland and associated with various periods of early settlement and activity. By the time later map editions were produced, it had already vanished from the cartographic record, suggesting it was levelled sometime in the nineteenth century, likely as farmland was reworked. What remains today is a slightly raised oval area, measuring approximately twenty-five metres east to west and twenty-eight metres north to south, perceptibly larger than the original mapped feature, which may reflect how the levelled material spread outward over time.
The enclosure sits at the narrow northern end of a roughly triangular modern field, and the low rise on which it stands affords good views of the surrounding landscape. The clearest way to read the site is through the vegetation itself: the dry, close-cropped grass that marks the raised ground stands out sharply against the rush-filled wetness around it, a distinction most legible when the surrounding pasture is at its most waterlogged.