Enclosure, Killedan, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Killedan, Co. Mayo

In the pasture above the Pollagh River in County Mayo, there is a place that exists more convincingly on paper than on the ground.

A circular embanked enclosure, roughly 25 metres across, was recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838, sitting close to where the land tips away to the south-east and drops for a hundred metres or so toward the river. By the time later map editions were produced, it had vanished from the cartographic record entirely. Today, there is no visible surface trace at ground level.

Enclosures of this kind, defined by an earthen bank forming a rough circle, are common across Ireland, and their purposes varied widely: some were ringforts serving as enclosed farmsteads in the early medieval period, others had ritual or funerary functions reaching back much further. What makes this particular example quietly curious is the gap between its documented existence and its current invisibility. The 1838 survey was a remarkably thorough piece of work, carried out with considerable care across the entire island, so the feature that was mapped then was almost certainly real. Whether it was levelled by agricultural activity, eroded gradually, or simply proved too slight to survive in legible form, is not recorded. The land has closed over it.

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Pete F
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