Enclosure, Cloonyarigaun, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Cloonyarigaun, Co. Mayo

On a ridge top in Cloonyarigaun, County Mayo, there is a site that has almost entirely ceased to exist, yet was carefully recorded as recently as the nineteenth century.

What survives today is not a monument in any conventional sense but rather a slight curve in a field fence, half-buried in overgrowth, tracing a northeastern to southeastern arc across pasture land. That curving line may be all that remains of something considerably older.

The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced during one of the most systematic cartographic exercises ever carried out in Ireland, recorded a circular ringfort-like enclosure here with a diameter of roughly twenty-five to thirty metres. The site was classified as a possible rath, the word rath referring to a roughly circular earthen enclosure, typically dating from the early medieval period, which would have enclosed a farmstead and its outbuildings. By the time the next major OS edition was published in 1930, the enclosure had disappeared from the map entirely. A curving field boundary was noted at the location, but the rath itself was no longer considered a legible feature. At ground level today there is no visible trace beyond that overgrown fence line on the eastern arc.

The ridge setting is worth noting. Ground falls away sharply to the east and more gradually to the north and west, and the northern and northeastern views are particularly open. This kind of elevated, well-surveyed position was typical of rath construction, offering both a practical vantage point and a degree of natural defence on at least one side. The site now exists in a peculiar state: present on a map made almost two centuries ago, absent from one made ninety years later, and surviving today only in the faint geometry of a hedgerow that may or may not remember what it once enclosed.

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Pete F
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