Enclosure, Creevaroddaun, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Creevaroddaun, Co. Mayo

In the undulating pasture of Creevaroddaun, in the quiet country south of Lough Mask in County Mayo, there is a field that once contained a circular enclosure and now contains nothing at all.

No earthwork, no stone, no hollow in the ground signals that anything was ever here. The site has been fully cleared, leaving what amounts to an archaeological negative space, a place defined entirely by what has been removed.

The enclosure first appears on the Ordnance Survey map of 1838, recorded as a circular feature in the landscape. By the time a later edition was produced in 1929, it was being described as roughly oval, measuring approximately 43 metres on its northwest to southeast axis and 38 metres northeast to southwest. Whether that shift from circle to oval reflects a genuine change in the feature, a difference in surveying method, or simply a more careful look, is impossible to say now. Enclosures of this general type are common across Ireland and range widely in date and function, from early medieval ringforts used as defended farmsteads to prehistoric ceremonial sites, and without excavation there is no way to know what this one was. What the maps do confirm is that something substantial enough to be recorded twice, across nearly a century of cartographic work, has since been erased entirely from the ground.

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