Enclosure, Cashellahenny, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
In the low-lying pasture and scrub of Cashellahenny, a nearly circular boundary about sixty metres across quietly resists being forgotten.
Most of its drystone wall has gone, or been swallowed. A field drain clips its northwestern edge; a later field wall cuts straight through its middle. Yet the curve of the thing persists, readable as a slight undulation in the ground where the wall was taken down, and in short surviving sections to the southeast and southwest where mossy, ivy-covered stonework still stands to between half a metre and just over a metre in height. The northeastern interior is flat, waterlogged, and gives underfoot. It is the kind of site that a person could walk across without quite registering what it was.
What makes the location quietly compelling is its relationship to the hill to the northeast, on top of which sits a cashel, a type of early medieval stone-walled enclosure typically associated with a high-status farmstead or defended settlement. The enclosure below may have been functionally connected to that cashel, perhaps serving as an outer enclosure or a working area associated with it, though its precise purpose remains unresolved. What the cartographic record does suggest is a site that was already losing definition by the nineteenth century: the 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map does not show it at all, the later twenty-five inch plan records it as a circular enclosure, and by the 1920 six-inch edition only the southern arc was legible enough to map. Each successive survey caught a little less of it, as scrub and agricultural reorganisation continued their work.