Enclosure, Cloonta, Co. Mayo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Cloonta, Co. Mayo

In a stretch of flat Mayo pasture, where the ground softens westward into heather-covered bog, there is a low, sub-circular earthwork that has managed to go unrecorded on Ordnance Survey maps spanning nearly a century.

The six-inch maps of 1837 to 1838 do not show it. Neither does the 1922 edition. Whatever this enclosure at Cloonta is, it was either overlooked by surveyors, or it had already faded so thoroughly into the land by then that it simply did not register as anything worth marking.

What survives is a slightly raised area measuring roughly 31 metres east to west and around 25 metres north to south. On its south-western side there is a remnant of an earthen bank, a few metres long and about 65 centimetres high on its outer face, with the rest of the perimeter defined by a low scarp, the kind of subtle step in the ground that could easily be walked across without a second thought. Beyond that scarp runs a broad, shallow fosse, which is simply a ditch or trench dug as part of the original boundary, traceable along the northern and eastern arcs. Further out at the north-east, a slight flat-topped rise with noticeably different vegetation may represent the ghost of an external bank, though the ground at that point is ambiguous. Two causeway-like features cross the fosse, one to the east and one to the west-south-west, but whether either marks an original entrance or is simply a later disturbance is not clear. The interior is level but uneven underfoot. To the south, where the enclosure's outline becomes indistinct, the earthwork quietly dissolves into bog, and a rough farm track runs along a few metres beyond that.

The structure has the general form of a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead that was built across Ireland primarily during the early medieval period, though no dating evidence is mentioned for this particular site. What is notable here is the ambiguity, the eroded banks, the uncertain entrances, the southern arc that is more suggestion than edge. The enclosure sits at a boundary between pasture and peatland, and that boundary seems to have been quietly absorbing it for a very long time.

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Pete F
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