Enclosure, Cloonturk, Co. Mayo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Cloonturk, Co. Mayo

In the improved pasture of Cloonturk townland in County Mayo, there is a site that has been entirely erased from the landscape, yet survives with quiet precision on paper.

A possible rath, the kind of circular or near-circular earthwork enclosure that served as a farmstead in early medieval Ireland, once occupied a low rise here, with boggy ground stretching away to the south and a high ridge looming to the north. Today, there is no visible trace of it at ground level.

The earliest reliable record of the enclosure comes from the 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which shows a D-shaped feature roughly twenty metres in diameter. The straight edge of the D faced south, where an east-west field boundary had already cut across it, suggesting the enclosure was being compromised even before it was formally recorded. By the time the next comparable mapping was carried out, the 1930 Ordnance Survey edition, the feature had vanished from the cartographic record entirely. The land had been improved, the rise absorbed into working pasture, and whatever earthwork remained had been levelled flat. The gap between those two surveys, less than a century, was enough.

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