Enclosure, Carrowneden, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Carrowneden, Co. Mayo

In the limestone pasture of Carrowneden, Co. Mayo, there is a place that exists only on paper.

A small rectangular enclosure, measuring roughly six metres by five and a half, was recorded in 1984 and then erased. Land reclamation in the late 1980s or early 1990s removed every trace of it, and today the ground offers nothing to look at. The site is, in a particular sense, more interesting for its absence than it might ever have been for its presence.

When it was recorded, the enclosure appeared as a low bank of stones and earth set in undulating limestone terrain. Its south-western and south-eastern corners connected with short projections from a curving field wall, which in turn linked to the enclosing wall of a nearby cashel. A cashel is a type of early medieval stone-walled enclosure, typically circular, used to demarcate a settlement or farmstead. The spatial relationship between the small rectangular enclosure, the field wall, and the cashel suggests they formed part of a coherent agricultural or domestic arrangement, each element tied to the others in a way that presumably made practical sense to whoever laid them out. Whether the rectangular enclosure was a garden plot, an animal pen, or something else entirely, the 1984 record does not say. That record is now the only evidence the structure ever existed.

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Pete F
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