Enclosure, Kilmoremoy, Co. Mayo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Kilmoremoy, Co. Mayo

Buried within League Cemetery in County Mayo is a circular earthwork that managed to escape the notice of Ordnance Survey cartographers in both 1837 and 1930.

That omission is striking: the OS six-inch maps were meticulous documents, and an earthwork roughly 27 metres across is not a small thing to miss. The enclosure survives as a slightly raised, roughly circular platform defined by a scarp, the artificial slope that marks its edge. On the eastern side that scarp still stands about 1.2 metres high and is clearly legible, but moving around the circuit it becomes progressively harder to follow, fading at the south-west and disappearing altogether to the north and north-west beneath dense overgrowth.

What the enclosure contains is quietly suggestive. Alongside 18th- and 19th-century headstones and grave slabs, there are low, uninscribed markers of the kind associated with much older burial traditions. In the north-east quadrant, a stone bearing a carved cross protrudes from the ground, and against the eastern scarp lies what may be a bullaun stone. Bullauns are boulders or stones with one or more artificial cup-shaped hollows worn or cut into them; they appear regularly at early ecclesiastical sites across Ireland and are often associated with ritual use, though their precise function is debated. The presence of these older features alongside post-medieval graves points to a site with a considerably longer history of use than its current appearance suggests. About 150 metres down the slope to the east sits Kilmoremoy graveyard, which surrounds a medieval church, so this elevated enclosure may represent an earlier focus of activity in the same religious landscape, predating the church below it or operating alongside it.

The enclosure is most legible on its eastern arc, where the scarp is sharpest and the cross-inscribed stone and possible bullaun are within a short distance of each other. The northern portion, swallowed by thicket, is effectively inaccessible, and the southern edge has been disturbed by more recent burial activity. Visiting with the medieval church and graveyard to the east in mind helps place the two sites in relation to each other and gives the otherwise unremarkable-looking earthwork a clearer context.

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