Enclosure, Frenchgrove, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Frenchgrove, Co. Mayo

Between the first Ordnance Survey of Ireland in 1838 and the editions that followed, a circular earthwork at Frenchgrove quietly vanished from the maps.

It did not disappear from the ground, but it disappeared from the record, which amounts to much the same thing in terms of how a place gets remembered. The enclosure, sitting on a plateau in County Mayo with the Partry Mountains ranged along the far horizon to the south-west and north-west, was simply no longer considered worth marking.

What survives today is a low, subcircular platform, roughly 24.5 metres across its north-west to south-east axis and around 21 metres on the other. A scarp, the gentle slope left when an earthen bank has been partly levelled by centuries of agricultural use, still traces most of its circuit. The 1838 map suggests the original enclosure measured somewhere between 35 and 40 metres in diameter, meaning a significant portion of the earthwork has been lost. A field bank cuts across the north-western third of the interior on a north-east to south-west axis, accompanied by a silted field ditch on its northern side, evidence that at some point the enclosure was absorbed into the working farmland around it and subdivided accordingly. The northern portion, where that field boundary has left things relatively undisturbed, preserves the clearest scarping, still standing between half a metre and three-quarters of a metre high. A small grove of pine trees grows there now, and four of them have been planted directly on the enclosure scarp itself, their roots presumably threading down through whatever archaeology remains beneath.

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