Enclosure, Cloonmeen, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Cloonmeen, Co. Mayo

In the rough, boggy pasture of Cloonmeen in County Mayo, a structure once existed that has since been erased so completely that the ground gives nothing away.

Not a mound, not a dip, not a scatter of stone; the enclosure recorded here has vanished entirely from the landscape, leaving only its outline in two editions of the Ordnance Survey maps as evidence that it was ever there at all.

The earlier of those two maps, the six-inch OS sheet surveyed in 1838, shows a subrectangular enclosure measuring roughly 20 to 25 metres north to south and around 20 metres east to west. By the time the 1920 edition was produced, the picture had already shifted. The enclosure appears by then as penannular, meaning it formed an almost complete ring with a deliberate opening, in this case facing east, and it had been absorbed into a wider network of field boundaries running off to the north and southeast. Whether this change reflects genuine alteration to the structure between those two surveys, or simply a difference in how surveyors interpreted and recorded what they found, is impossible to say now. What is clear is that at some point after 1920, both the enclosure and all the field boundaries associated with it were removed, leaving the flat, boggy ground with no visible trace whatsoever. Enclosures of this general type and scale are commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, where a circular or near-circular earthen bank would have defined a domestic space, a farmstead, or an area of protected ground. Here, that history has been thoroughly effaced.

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Pete F
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