Enclosure, Carrowsteelagh, Co. Mayo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Carrowsteelagh, Co. Mayo

Between the grass-covered dunes and the open pasture of Carrowsteelagh, there is a low, moss-furred ring in the ground that most people would walk straight past without a second thought.

It is only roughly twenty metres across, its enclosing bank barely rising above ankle height in places, and yet the whole thing is quietly and deliberately shaped, a circle drawn in earth that has been softening back into the landscape for an unknown number of centuries.

What survives is a sub-circular enclosure, approximately 20 metres north to south and 17.3 metres east to west, defined by the remnants of a bank and an external fosse. A fosse is simply a ditch dug around the outside of a structure, the excavated material typically thrown inward to raise the bank, and here both elements persist, though barely. The bank, between one and a half and two metres wide, is most legible on the western half of the enclosure, where it still reads as a hummocky rise; elsewhere it has eroded to little more than a scarp. The fosse beside it is a shallow depression, its base around a metre across. The interior is flat but uneven, and sits at roughly the same level as the surrounding ground, which suggests the site has seen considerable silting and settling over time. A gap on the south-south-east side, roughly two and a half to three metres wide, marks what was the entrance, with a slight causeway still traceable across the fosse. The whole thing sits in a natural dip in the terrain, surrounded by undulating grassland dotted with hummocks and small sand-quarrying pits, the rising ground to the south and west closing off the views in those directions while Killala Bay opens out to the east and Kilcummin Head is visible to the north-north-east. A tractor track runs along the southern edge, a reminder that this is still working farmland, and that the enclosure has survived not in isolation but alongside centuries of ordinary agricultural life.

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Pete F
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