Enclosure, Devlin, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
A low circular bank sitting in rough pasture a couple of hundred metres from the Mayo coastline is easy to walk past without a second glance.
The ground inside barely rises above the surrounding field, and the outer face of the bank has slumped considerably over time. Stones of various sizes push up through the earthwork at irregular intervals, giving it a slightly unruly look. Yet the shape itself is deliberate: a roughly circular enclosure measuring about 10.4 metres north to south and 8 metres east to west, defined by a bank approximately 2.5 metres wide that still stands around 0.7 metres high on its external face.
Enclosures of this kind are a familiar feature of the Irish landscape. They are sometimes referred to as ringforts, the remains of enclosed farmsteads or settlement sites built predominantly during the early medieval period, though some examples are older and dating individual examples without excavation is difficult. They vary enormously in condition, and this one at Devlin sits firmly at the more eroded end of the spectrum. The inner face of the bank has almost entirely dissolved into the interior ground level, leaving little sense of the original enclosure from inside. What survives more clearly is the exterior, where the slumped bank still traces the full circuit of the structure. A field fence runs immediately to the east of the enclosure, and a house with associated outbuildings stands just to its north, so the site exists in a kind of domestic nearness, hemmed in by modern land use on at least two sides. The low-lying pastureland strip it occupies runs close to the Atlantic, with beaches accessible within a few hundred metres in two directions.