Enclosure, Carrowmore, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
At Carrowmore in County Mayo, there is a recorded enclosure, a monument significant enough to have been logged in the national archaeological record, yet one that currently exists in a kind of documentary limbo.
The details of what precisely stands or once stood there, its dimensions, its date, its form, remain held in archive rather than in any publicly accessible description. An enclosure, in the broadest archaeological sense, refers to an area defined and bounded by some combination of bank, ditch, wall, or fence, and such features can range from prehistoric ceremonial sites to early medieval farmsteads. Which category this particular example belongs to is, for the moment, a matter for the archive rather than the open record.
Carrowmore is a place-name found in several counties across Ireland, derived from the Irish An Ceathrú Mhór, meaning the great quarter, referring historically to a division of land. In Mayo, as elsewhere, such townlands frequently preserve traces of long and layered occupation, from the earliest farmers of the Neolithic period through to the reorganisations of the post-medieval landscape. Enclosures of one kind or another appear at many points in that long sequence, and without further detail it is not possible to say more about this particular monument than that it was recorded, considered worth noting, and given a place in the inventory of the county's surviving or formerly visible archaeology.