Enclosure, Carrownaglogh, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
On a gently rolling ridge top in County Mayo, somewhere above the Glenree or Owenmore River, three circular enclosures once stood in close formation.
Today, none of them leave any trace at ground level. The most northerly of the three is an absence so complete that it had already disappeared from the Ordnance Survey map by 1922, roughly eighty years after it was first recorded on the 1837 to 1838 six-inch survey.
All three enclosures were roughly 25 metres in diameter and spaced tightly together, the second sitting only about 15 metres to the south of the first, the third about 50 metres further on. Circular enclosures of this kind are a broad category in Irish archaeology, ranging from early medieval farmsteads to prehistoric ritual sites, and the clustering of three in such close proximity is unusual enough to suggest they were related in function or period. Whatever their original purpose, all three were levelled, and the northernmost was apparently gone, or going, before the early twentieth century. The pasture that covers the ridge now gives no indication that anything was ever arranged beneath it.