Enclosure, Kildun More, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
There is something quietly unsettling about a place that exists more fully on paper than it does on the ground.
At Kildun More in County Mayo, an ancient enclosure, the kind of circular or semi-circular earthwork that would once have defined a farmstead or a place of significance in the early Irish landscape, has been so thoroughly levelled that no surface traces remain. The field is pasture now, unremarkable to any eye that does not already know what once lay beneath the grass.
The most that can be said with confidence is that as late as 1929, the Ordnance Survey map recorded an arc of bank at this location, a curved ridge of earth that would have been the last legible remnant of the original structure. Enclosures of this type are common across Ireland, often associated with early medieval settlement, but the evidence at Kildun More had already been reduced to a fragment by the time cartographers noted it. At some point between that survey and the present, even that fragment disappeared, ploughed or grazed or simply weathered into nothing. A survey of Ballinrobe and its surrounding district, encompassing the areas around Lough Mask and Lough Carra, catalogued the site in 1994, recording its absence as much as its presence.