Enclosure, Carrowndangan, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
In the pasture at Carrowndangan, at the foot of a north-facing ridge in County Mayo, there is an enclosure that exists only on paper.
The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows it clearly: a circular feature roughly fifteen metres across, its outline planted with trees, sitting at the base of a slope. By the time later map editions were produced, it had vanished from the cartographic record entirely. At ground level today, there is no visible trace whatsoever, no earthwork, no depression, no scatter of stone.
What the 1838 surveyors recorded and why it subsequently disappeared are questions the surviving evidence cannot answer. The trees planted around its perimeter suggest it was a recognised feature in the landscape at the time of the survey, perhaps a defined enclosure of some practical or ceremonial significance, or possibly the remnant of a rath, the type of circular earthen enclosure commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, that was already fading by the nineteenth century. The wider landscape around it is suggestive. Roughly fifty metres to the south-southwest, on top of the ridge itself, there is a rath. About seventy metres to the south lies a holy well. The clustering of these features points to a locality that held some meaning across a long stretch of time, even if the enclosure at its base has left no physical mark on the ground.