Enclosure, Hazelhill, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Hazelhill, Co. Mayo

On the southern edge of Ballyhaunis, somewhere beneath the developed ground, lies the ghost of a circular earthwork that has not been visible to the human eye for decades.

No bank, no dip, no crop mark betrays its presence now; the original topography has been entirely overwritten by modern construction.

The enclosure first appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, recorded as a circular embanked feature, the kind of rounded earthwork that typically served as a farmstead or small settlement in early medieval Ireland. By the time the 1916 edition of the same survey was produced, it was being mapped as a broadly oval hachured enclosure, the hachure marks indicating a raised or ridged outline, measuring roughly 35 metres east to west and 40 metres north to south. That 1916 record may be the last time any cartographer or surveyor could meaningfully document it. Redevelopment swallowed whatever earthen fabric remained, and nothing survives at ground level today.

What makes this place worth pausing over is precisely that quality of erasure. The 1838 and 1916 maps preserve two snapshots of something slowly diminishing, and together they trace the arc from a legible field monument to a blank patch of ground that holds no outward clue to what once stood there.

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Pete F
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