Enclosure, Garrymore, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
In a field at Garrymore in County Mayo, the ground itself tells a story of carefully shaped earth.
What survives here is a broadly oval raised platform, roughly 56 metres across at its widest, encircled by a perimeter scarp, a stepped drop in ground level that marks the edge of the enclosure. At its tallest, on the northern side, that scarp rises to about 1.6 metres. Beyond it lie the remains of a fosse, a defensive ditch, and beyond that again, a low outer bank. Together these concentric features describe a site that was once deliberately engineered to be set apart from its surroundings.
The internal topography offers a quiet puzzle. The western half of the platform sits noticeably higher than the rest, with the ground sloping gradually away to the north, east, and south-east. Whether that asymmetry reflects an original design or the slow settling of centuries is difficult to say from surface evidence alone. The fosse, which measures up to 2.6 metres wide and survives to a depth of nearly a metre on the northern arc, is traceable from the south around to the north-east. At that north-eastern point, however, the story becomes complicated: the ditch merges with a modern field boundary and is now thickly lined with hawthorn, suggesting it was re-dug at some point in the recent past for purely agricultural purposes. A straight field bank and accompanying ditch on a roughly north-south axis also cut across the line of the fosse on the eastern side, further obscuring the original form. Farm stock have worn away sections of the scarp at the north and east, and a broader slumped area is visible at the south-east, the accumulated result of animals crossing the same ground over many generations.
The site rewards slow observation. The surviving outer bank, roughly four metres wide and standing about 0.6 metres on its outer face, is most legible on the southern and north-western sides where later disturbance has been lighter. The hawthorn-filled section to the north-east, though it complicates any reading of the original ditch, at least traces the enclosure's curve and gives a sense of scale. The overall outline, once you have walked it, is surprisingly complete for a monument that has been farmed around and through for so long.