Enclosure, Cuillaun, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Cuillaun, Co. Mayo

In a field at Cuillaun in County Mayo, a circle exists that you cannot see from the ground.

There is no wall, no raised bank, no scattered stone. The enclosure, roughly ten metres across, survives only as a difference in how the grass grows, a faint circular vegetation mark discernible from the air but invisible to anyone standing in the pasture above it.

The site was first formally recorded in the 1991 Sites and Monuments Record and again in the 1996 Record of Monuments and Places, both entries based on a small circular feature spotted in an aerial photograph. Enclosures of this kind, circular or roughly circular boundaries defined by a bank, ditch, or wall, appear across Ireland in enormous variety, serving at different times as farmsteads, burial grounds, or ceremonial spaces. This one, sitting in a natural depression in pasture land, measures somewhere between five and ten metres in diameter, which places it at the smaller end of the scale. Whatever once marked its boundary at ground level has long since disappeared, leaving only the subterranean trace that causes the vegetation above it to behave slightly differently from the surrounding field.

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Pete F
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