Enclosure, Ellagh More, Co. Mayo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ellagh More, Co. Mayo

In a pasture at Ellagh More, on the western edge of a marshy strip of ground, the land rises almost imperceptibly.

That gentle swell in the grass is, in all likelihood, what remains of an early medieval rath, a type of circular earthen enclosure that once served as a farmstead or defended homestead for a local family of some standing. There is nothing dramatic to see now, but the faint topography underfoot is carrying a considerable amount of history.

The site was already being erased by the time anyone thought to map it carefully. The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded a circular embanked enclosure with a diameter of between thirty and thirty-five metres, with a field boundary pressing in close from the west-northwest. By the time the 1922 edition was drawn, the form had changed noticeably: it appeared as a D-shape, roughly twenty metres across from north to south, its straight northern edge cut through by a field boundary running east-northeast to west-southwest. That boundary, likely representing property lines that had little interest in preserving older archaeology, had already truncated the enclosure significantly. At some point between those two surveys, or possibly after the later one, the earthwork was levelled entirely. The enclosure's circular bank, which would once have defined a private space within the surrounding agricultural landscape, survives now only as a low, undulating rise. The field fence that helped erase its northern arc continues to mark the property boundary today.

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Pete F
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