Enclosure, Cottage, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Cottage, Co. Mayo

On a ridge in County Mayo, just below its highest point, sits a low earthwork that the Ordnance Survey mapmakers never recorded.

Every edition of the OS six-inch maps passed over it entirely, and the site only came to light through aerial photography, which revealed the distinctive outline of a D-shaped enclosure pressed into the pasture.

The enclosure takes the form of a low platform, roughly 46 metres along its longer axis running north-north-west to south-south-east, and around 25 metres across. Its curving edge, running from south-south-east around to north, is defined by a scarp, a gentle step in the ground about 0.6 metres high with a sloped face roughly 1.8 metres wide. This curved boundary is less well preserved on the southern arc. The straight side of the D, at the north-east, is not an earthwork at all but a high scarp and hedgerow that borders a road, suggesting the road margin may have been incorporated into the enclosure's design, or that the two features share a long-established boundary. There is a narrow break of about two metres in the scarp at the north-west, which may represent an original entrance, and a post-and-wire fence now crosses the southern end of the platform. The ground drops away steeply to the south-west, opening out onto wide views across low-lying pasture and bog.

D-shaped enclosures of this kind are not uncommon in the Irish landscape. They are generally interpreted as settlement enclosures, farmstead boundaries, or occasionally ecclesiastical enclosures, though without excavation it is difficult to assign a date or function with confidence. What makes this example quietly interesting is its invisibility in the cartographic record and the fact that aerial photography alone brought it into view, a reminder of how much the Irish landscape still holds just below the threshold of what walkers or map-readers would ordinarily notice.

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Pete F
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