Enclosure, Derreen, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
On a low ridge in Derreen, Co. Mayo, there is a near-perfect circle in the ground that nobody can quite explain.
A raised earthen bank, roughly thirty metres across, runs almost uniformly around a slightly elevated interior, its inner and outer faces cut close to the vertical, its height and width barely varying as it completes the circuit. Mature beech and sycamore trees have taken root both inside and along the bank itself, and a faint, fosse-like depression sits along the inner eastern edge. Wet pasture and bog stretch away at the base of the ridge to the west, north, and east, which only adds to the sense of the feature sitting deliberately apart from its surroundings.
What the enclosure actually is remains an open question. One possibility is that it is a rath, the kind of circular earthwork that served as a farmstead enclosure in early medieval Ireland, typically defined by one or more banks and ditches surrounding a domestic interior. Raths are common across the Irish landscape, but this one, if that is what it is, may have been adapted at some later point to serve as a tree-ring, an enclosure built or maintained specifically to protect and display a stand of ornamental trees, a practice associated with demesne landscaping in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The two functions have left similar traces in the ground, which is part of what makes the site difficult to read. The western arc of the bank has been absorbed into a field fence running roughly north-north-west to south-south-east, suggesting the feature has been quietly worked around and incorporated into later land use rather than preserved in any formal sense. Four low breaks in the bank, at the north-west, north-east, south-east, and south-west, hint at possible original entrances, though erosion makes it hard to be certain.