Enclosure, Creevagh, Co. Mayo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Creevagh, Co. Mayo

In a gently sloping pasture at Creevagh, a stone field fence follows a line that is older than it looks.

Beneath and behind it runs the remains of a cashel wall, a substantial dry-stone boundary of the kind built in early medieval Ireland to define and protect a significant enclosure. The cashel here was once roughly circular and approximately 120 metres in diameter, large enough to have functioned as a communal or ecclesiastical precinct rather than a simple farmstead. The eastern to northern arc of that wall has been levelled entirely, absorbed over centuries into the working agricultural landscape, but the footprint it once described is still legible, and what it enclosed gives a strong indication of why it was built in the first place.

Inside the old boundary sit a church and a graveyard, both of which suggest this was a place of religious significance for the surrounding area. The cashel, in this context, would have served as the outer enclosure of an early ecclesiastical site, a form of boundary common in early Christian Ireland where a substantial stone wall demarcated sacred ground from the secular world beyond. The Ordnance Survey map of 1838 still recorded the circular form clearly enough for later surveyors to reconstruct its original extent, which means that for at least a further century and a half after that mapping, the wall continued to disappear quietly under later field boundaries. A 1994 archaeological survey of the Ballinrobe district, covering the areas around Lough Mask and Lough Carra, brought the site's surviving remains together into a single description, noting the 1.8-metre wall width where the cashel can still be identified beneath the later stonework.

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Pete F
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