Enclosure, Carrownaglogh, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
In a field of ordinary pasture in County Mayo, there is a small raised oval platform that someone, at some unknown point in the past, went to considerable trouble to make perfectly level.
The ground here naturally slopes, so the builders compensated by piling up earth and stone on the southern and south-western side, engineering a flat interior from an awkward gradient. The result is an enclosure roughly twelve metres across at its widest, its western arc defined by a bank of earth and stone, its other sides formed by a scarped edge that drops away sharply. That scarp reaches about 1.7 metres on the exterior, giving the whole feature a quiet but deliberate presence in the landscape.
The enclosure sits on the southern side of a natural rise, with wet, low-lying ground pressing in from the east and the Glenree, also known as the Owenmore River, running just forty metres to the south. The positioning is careful in a way that suggests purpose rather than accident: the wet ground to the east would have made approach from that direction awkward, and the riverbank to the south would have served as a natural boundary. Immediately to the west of the enclosure, the same natural rise has been scarped again to create a small semi-circular terrace, sitting roughly half a metre below the level of the enclosure interior. A slump in the bank on the east-south-east side, about 1.5 metres wide, may mark where an original entrance once stood. Enclosures of this kind, broadly circular or oval earthworks defined by banks and ditches or scarped edges, appear across Ireland in considerable variety, associated with settlement, agriculture, and ritual use across many centuries, though without excavation it is rarely possible to say which function any individual example served.