Enclosure, Greenwood, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Greenwood, Co. Mayo

In the pastureland of Greenwood, Co. Mayo, on a gentle rise in the ground, there is a circular enclosure that exists only on paper.

It was recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838, drawn as a distinct feature roughly fifteen to twenty metres across, and then, by the time the next major survey came around in 1917, it had simply vanished from the cartographic record. At ground level today, there is nothing to see at all.

Circular enclosures of this kind are a common enough feature of the Irish landscape, typically the remains of a ringfort or a related early medieval settlement boundary, a low earthen or stone bank enclosing a domestic space. What makes the Greenwood example quietly puzzling is the gap between its two map appearances. Something was visible or known to the 1838 surveyors, something substantial enough to warrant inclusion, yet within roughly eighty years it had either been levelled, absorbed into agricultural improvement, or simply missed by a later survey team working under different conditions or priorities. Whether it was ever excavated, or whether any local tradition attached itself to the site, is not recorded. The field itself gives nothing away.

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Pete F
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