Enclosure, Inis Gé Thuaidh, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Inis Gé Thuaidh, Co. Mayo

On the north-east end of Inishkea North, a small island off the Mayo coast, a roughly rectangular outline sits quietly in the grass of the machair plain.

Machair is the Gaelic term for the low-lying, lime-rich grassland that forms on Atlantic coastal sand, and it gives this part of the island its particular flatness and openness. What remains here is an enclosure, approximately 16.8 metres north to south and 14.5 metres east to west, defined by sod-covered wall footings that barely rise above the surrounding ground. At the northern side, the inner and outer edges of the wall, formed of stones set upright or laid on edge, are still legible. At the eastern side, three courses of the inner wall face survive to a height of just 0.3 metres. The enclosed space itself is level and grassy, giving little away.

The enclosure appears on the 1921 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as part of a named settlement cluster called Turrows. It was not an isolated structure. A house stood four metres to the north-west, a row of three conjoined houses lay ten metres to the east, and a second enclosure of similar character sat twenty metres to the north-east. Taken together, these remains suggest a coherent, if modest, domestic landscape, a small community organised around shared space on the island's machair. Inishkea North was permanently inhabited until the early twentieth century, when its population was evacuated following a tragedy at sea in 1927, and the Turrows cluster belongs to that now-vanished settlement pattern. The wall footings here, their stones carefully set rather than simply tumbled into place, point to construction that was deliberate and considered, even at this quiet edge of the sand hill.

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