Enclosure, Killeenrevagh, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
In a neglected garden field beside a derelict cottage in Killeenrevagh, County Mayo, something has almost entirely disappeared.
What survives is a faint grass-covered rise, no more than two to three metres wide, curving in a shallow arc from west to north along the field's northern edge, pressing up against the wall that borders the road. It is easy to walk past without registering it at all.
Ordnance Survey mapping tells a story of gradual erasure. The six-inch map produced in 1838 clearly marks a small circular enclosure on this spot, and the later twenty-five-inch plan records it with hachures, the short radiating lines that cartographers used to indicate an earthwork or raised feature, with a diameter estimated at roughly twelve to fifteen metres. By the time the six-inch edition was revised in 1930, the enclosure had vanished from the map altogether. Whether it had been levelled, ploughed out, or simply reduced beyond what surveyors felt worth recording is not known. What remains on the ground today, if the slight undulation is indeed a remnant, represents the last physical trace of a feature that was already considered unremarkable enough to drop from official cartography within living memory of its last clear depiction. The site sits adjacent to a townland boundary, a location that sometimes reflects the age of an enclosure, since such features often predate the administrative divisions laid over the landscape in later centuries.