Enclosure, Cloonfeightrin, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
On a north-facing slope in Cloonfeightrin, beside an ordinary working farmstead, there is a patch of ground that has been quietly erasing its own past for the better part of two centuries.
What survives today is a low, broad slope barely a metre high, a silage store, and very little else to suggest that anything here was ever deliberately shaped. Yet the site has an earlier identity recorded in precise cartographic detail, and the gap between what the maps once showed and what the land now offers is worth dwelling on.
The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map marked this as a circular enclosure, roughly fifteen to twenty metres in diameter. Circular enclosures of this kind are among the most common early medieval monument types in Ireland, typically the remains of a ringfort or ráth, a farmstead enclosed by an earthen bank and ditch, though the term covers a range of functions and periods. By the 1920 edition of the same mapping series, the picture had already changed considerably. Only an arc of hachuring in the north-west remained to suggest the original form, while straight field boundaries had cut across the eastern, southern, and western sides, converting a curved ancient boundary into something angular and agricultural. Within living memory, the place was described locally as a small rectangular area, roughly fifteen to twenty metres east to west and about ten metres north to south, with field fences on three sides, a sharp scarp on the north, a level interior, and a covering of trees. That version of it has also gone. The fences have been removed, the northern scarp graded down to a gentle rise, and the enclosed space given over to farm use.
The trajectory here is one that will be familiar to anyone who has looked closely at how the Irish landscape handles its older layers. A circular earthwork becomes a rectangular field feature, which becomes an informal yard, each change legible only if you know to compare what different generations of maps recorded. The 1838 survey caught it at its most intact; the 1920 survey caught it mid-transformation; local memory preserved a description of an intermediate state that no longer exists on the ground.