Enclosure, Frenchgrove, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Frenchgrove, Co. Mayo

On a raised pasture in Frenchgrove, County Mayo, there is a site that exists more convincingly on paper than it does on the ground.

Two concentric enclosures, one circular and one polygonal, were recorded by the Ordnance Survey in 1838, nesting inside each other with a gap of roughly twenty metres between them. By 1915, the inner circle had already vanished from the maps. Today, it has vanished from the earth as well.

The 1838 OS six-inch map, one of the most detailed surveys of the Irish landscape ever undertaken, captured the circular enclosure at between 35 and 40 metres in diameter, sitting within a larger polygonal enclosure that stretched to approximately 95 metres across. Polygonal enclosures of this kind, walled boundaries with multiple angled sides rather than a smooth curve, are relatively uncommon features in the Irish countryside, and their origins and functions are not always straightforward to interpret. The double-enclosure arrangement, with that deliberate intervening space, suggests something more considered than a simple field boundary. Whether the inner circle was a ringfort, a ritual space, or something else entirely, the record does not say, and the ground no longer offers any clues. The circular element left no visible trace at surface level, and most of the outer wall has since been cleared away as well.

What remains is a single section of the polygonal wall on the western side, running alongside a farm road. The elevated position means the surrounding landscape opens out generously in most directions, which may well have been part of the original logic of the place. The wall fragment is easy to pass without recognising it for what it is, the surviving edge of something that once had a much more deliberate shape.

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Pete F
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