Enclosure, Carrownaglogh, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
In the rough, stony pasture of Carrownaglogh in County Mayo, a low oval ring of turf and stone sits on the eastern end of a gentle rise, easy to overlook and easier still to mistake for a natural feature of the land.
What makes it quietly strange is not its size, which is modest, roughly fifteen metres across at its widest, but the deliberate shaping of the ground around it. To the east and south, the earth has been cut back to form an oblong terrace, a level platform sitting nearly half a metre below the enclosure itself, its edge still held by the remnants of stone facing. Someone went to considerable effort to create that threshold, and the reason is now lost.
The enclosure is oval in plan, defined by a sod-covered stone bank around two and a half metres wide and just under a metre high on its outer face. When the Office of Public Works made notes in 1967, the wall was still recognisable as a proper enclosing structure, comparable in build to the field walls that cross the surrounding landscape. By the time a more detailed inspection was carried out in 1995, it had slumped into something more ambiguous, its large stones and boulders partly the product of field clearance pushed up against or into the original fabric. The interior is level, and most of the western half is covered by a low, sod-covered heap of stones, the kind of accumulation that can mean many things or nothing at all. A two-metre gap on the eastern side, apparently lined with upright stones, is the likely original entrance, and it opens directly onto that cut terrace. To the north, the slope falls away into damp, boggy ground, and the enclosure's position on the rise would have given a clear view across the undulating terrain in most directions, which may or may not have mattered to whoever built it.