Enclosure, Knockanelo, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Knockanelo, Co. Mayo

At Knockanelo in County Mayo, a circular enclosure that appears on maps spanning nearly a century has since vanished from the ground entirely.

What the nineteenth-century cartographers recorded, and what later surveyors confirmed was still there in 1930, is no longer visible in the pasture where it once stood.

The enclosure showed up on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1837 and 1930 as a roughly circular feature approximately 23 to 25 metres in diameter, a size consistent with a ringfort. Ringforts, the most common monument type in the Irish landscape, were typically enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, bounded by one or more earthen banks and ditches. This one was already compromised before it disappeared altogether; a field boundary clipped its north-western edge, suggesting that agricultural reorganisation had begun encroaching on it at some point between its first mapping and its eventual levelling. By the time of any modern inspection, the enclosure had been levelled completely, leaving only its cartographic outline as evidence that it was ever there.

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