Enclosure, Johnsfort, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Johnsfort, Co. Mayo

At Johnsfort in County Mayo, there is an enclosure that barely announces itself.

It appears in the landscape as a slightly raised semicircular area of pasture, roughly 28.7 metres across at its widest, with one straight edge rather than a full circle, giving it a distinct D-shape when seen from above. What makes it quietly unusual is how little it has left behind: no stonework, no dramatic earthworks, and no record on the Ordnance Survey's first detailed mapping of the area in 1838. It simply did not register, or perhaps had not yet degraded enough to leave a clear impression. By the 1931 edition of the same mapping series, it appears as a hachured D-shape, the conventional cartographic shorthand for an earthen enclosure.

The surviving remains are modest but legible. The curving northeastern to eastern arc is defined by a scarp, a low step in the ground roughly 1.6 metres high, which has since been pressed into service as a field boundary fence. Further around, between east and south, the line of the enclosure survives only as a cropmark, the kind of faint discolouration in vegetation that becomes visible in dry summers when buried features affect how plants grow above them. To the southwest, the boundary fades to a slight undulation in the ground. The straight northwestern edge, which gives the enclosure its D-shape, is not original; it was created by quarrying at some point in the modern era, cutting away whatever once stood there. Local knowledge adds one further detail that no map or physical survey could have supplied: the enclosure was originally bounded by a sod fence, built from cut turves rather than stone, which explains why so little survives above ground and why it left no trace in stone-rich archaeological records.

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Pete F
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