Enclosure, Kinnakillew, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
Between the tidal inlet to the north-west and the sandy bay to the south-east, tucked into a stream valley beneath the bulk of Mweelrae Mountain, a roughly circular enclosure sits in pasture and barely announces itself.
The boundary bank is so low and grass-covered in places that it reads more as a gentle swell in the ground than a deliberate structure, yet press your foot into it and the surface is unexpectedly firm, and occasional stones push through the turf hinting at a ruined wall underneath. The whole circuit measures around 47 metres north to south and 44 metres east to west, large enough to have once contained a small settlement, yet absent from both the 1838 and 1919 Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, which means it had already lost whatever form made it legible to nineteenth and early twentieth-century surveyors.
The enclosure belongs to a type of roughly circular or subcircular earthwork, sometimes called a ringfort or rath, that appears across Ireland in considerable numbers and was most commonly built during the early medieval period, broadly from the fifth to the twelfth centuries, as an enclosed farmstead or settlement. The bank here works with rather than against the natural terrain: to the north it backs onto a rock outcropping, and to the south-east it clips the base of a small hillock, so the boundary was clearly laid out with the existing landscape in mind. The most likely entrance, a gap around seven to eight metres wide, lies on the eastern side, oriented towards a natural pass through the rocky ground that leads to the coast. Inside, the interior is not simply open space. A roughly D-shaped subdivision runs along the western edge, its curving boundary defined by a moss-covered stony bank that still carries a small gap partway along. A barely visible north-east to south-west wall bisects the enclosure centrally, and the faint outline of a subrectangular space survives against the north-western bank. Relict cultivation ridges, the raised parallel lines left by spade or plough tillage, are visible in the surrounding field, and some of the softer undulations within the enclosure interior may represent the same agricultural activity carried out at a later date, overwriting whatever earlier purpose the subdivisions served.
The site sits in a genuinely sheltered position, the stream defining its southern and western edges while the rocky terrain to the west and the ridgelines to the north provide further enclosure. A drystone field wall, likely a later property boundary, has been laid directly over the outer edge of the enclosure bank to the south-east, which says something about how completely the structure had been absorbed into the working agricultural landscape by the time anyone thought to record it.