Enclosure, Claremount, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
In the townland of Claremount in County Mayo, an ancient enclosure sits in the landscape, recorded and mapped but not yet fully described to the public.
Enclosures of this kind are among the most common and least understood monument types in Ireland; the term covers a broad range of features, from the circular earthen banks of a ringfort used as a defended farmstead in the early medieval period, to earlier prehistoric enclosures whose purposes remain disputed. Without more detail, the form this particular example takes, whether a raised earthen ring, a stone-walled cashel, or something more ambiguous, remains an open question.
Claremount is a small townland in Mayo, a county with an exceptionally dense archaeological record shaped by millennia of settlement and by the unusual preservation that boggy, marginal land can afford. Enclosures in such landscapes sometimes survive as low, grass-grown banks that are easy to overlook on the ground but become clearly legible from above, their circular or oval outlines emerging in aerial photographs or LiDAR surveys. The monument has been recorded and assigned a place in the national inventory, which means someone, at some point, identified it as worth noting, but the full detail of that identification has not yet been made available in digitised form.