Enclosure, Killeenrevagh, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
In a quiet pasture in Killeenrevagh, County Mayo, there is a site that exists more convincingly on paper than on the ground.
A circular enclosure of roughly twenty metres in diameter was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, yet today there is nothing visible at ground level to confirm it was ever there. A field drain running on a northwest to southeast axis now cuts across the area where the enclosure was marked, and the land shows no obvious trace of a bank, ditch, or any other surface feature.
Circular enclosures of this kind are a familiar, if often ambiguous, presence in the Irish archaeological record. They range from early medieval ringforts, which served as enclosed farmsteads, to earlier prehistoric boundaries whose original function is harder to pin down. Without excavation or further survey, it is rarely possible to say with certainty what a site like this once was, or indeed whether the cartographic record reflects something genuine or a surveyor's misreading of the landscape. The 1838 OS mapping was a remarkable feat of documentation, but it captured a moment in time, and not everything marked has survived, or can be verified, at this distance. What the Killeenrevagh enclosure may have been remains an open question.