Enclosure, Culleens, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Culleens, Co. Mayo

In the pastureland outside Culleens, a circular earthwork roughly twenty metres across was carefully recorded by Ordnance Survey cartographers in 1837, then seemingly vanished.

Not physically, perhaps, but from the map record entirely: later OS editions omit it, and anyone visiting the site today will find no visible trace of an enclosure at ground level. What they will find is a low, rounded hillock, about fifty metres across, with a flattish top and sides that slope away more steeply to the north and south. It is the kind of feature that could easily be read as entirely natural, and may well be.

The 1837 OS six-inch maps were the product of a remarkably systematic survey of Ireland, and the surveyors who worked them were generally careful observers. If they recorded an embanked enclosure here, something circular and deliberate was likely visible at the time, even if only as a low earthen bank. Embanked enclosures of this kind are a broad category in the Irish archaeological record, ranging from prehistoric ceremonial sites to early medieval farmstead enclosures, the latter sometimes called raths or ringforts, which were typically defined by one or more earthen banks enclosing a domestic settlement. Whether the Culleens feature belonged to any such tradition is now impossible to say with confidence. Adding to the ambiguity, a roughly circular depression on the north-west slope of the hillock, between fifteen and twenty metres in diameter, is identified locally as an old sand pit, which may itself account for some of the landscape's altered appearance over the intervening two centuries.

The site sits in average to poorly drained pasture, and with nothing visible at ground level, there is little to distinguish this particular rise from the surrounding fields without prior knowledge of its mapped history. Its interest lies less in what can be seen than in the gap between what was once recorded and what now remains.

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