Enclosure, Cornaglaghta, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Cornaglaghta, Co. Mayo

In the reclaimed pasture of Cornaglaghta, on a slight rise in the Mayo landscape, there is an enclosure that exists almost entirely on paper.

It leaves no mark on the ground, no earthwork, no raised ring, nothing a walker would pause at. What we know of it comes from a single cartographic appearance: the 1916 edition of the Ordnance Survey map, which records an ovoid enclosure roughly 34 metres across its northeast to southwest axis and about 25 metres across its northwest to southeast axis, outlined in a solid line. The 1838 OS six-inch map, the earlier and often more detailed of the two surveys, shows nothing at all.

That gap between the two maps is quietly intriguing. The 1838 survey was the first systematic large-scale mapping of Ireland and captured a great deal of earthwork detail that has since been lost to agriculture. The fact that this enclosure does not appear on it, but does appear nearly eighty years later, raises questions that the ground cannot currently answer. It may be that it was already too degraded to record in 1838, or that the cartographers of that earlier survey simply did not include it. By 1916, whatever feature prompted the surveyors to draw that ovoid outline had apparently become visible enough to map, yet at some point after that it disappeared entirely, absorbed into the improved and levelled pasture that surrounds it today. Enclosures of this general type, roughly circular or ovoid ringworks defined by a bank and ditch, are found throughout Ireland and were used across a long sweep of prehistory and the early medieval period, though nothing in what survives here points to a specific date or function for this one.

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Pete F
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