Enclosure, Erriff, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Erriff, Co. Mayo

Along the Erriff valley in County Mayo, where the river cuts through some of the more dramatic upland terrain in Connacht, there lies a recorded enclosure whose details remain frustratingly out of reach.

It appears on the archaeological record as a monument, classified and given coordinates, yet the specifics of what it actually is, how large, how old, of what construction, remain officially undocumented in any publicly accessible form.

Enclosures in the Irish archaeological landscape cover a wide range of types and periods. The term can refer to anything from a small ringfort, a roughly circular earthwork that once surrounded a farmstead in the early medieval period, to a prehistoric ceremonial boundary, a later bawn wall associated with a fortified house, or even a field enclosure of uncertain date. Without further detail it is impossible to say which tradition this particular site belongs to. The Erriff valley itself has a long human history; the land around the river was worked and settled across many centuries, and the upland bogs have preserved traces of activity that lowland landscapes have long since lost. That an enclosure should be recorded here is entirely plausible, even expected. That so little is known about it, at least in any form currently available to the public, gives it a particular kind of anonymity among the hundreds of monuments catalogued across Mayo.

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