Enclosure, Lanmore, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
In the townland of Lanmore in County Mayo, an enclosure sits in the landscape, recorded and mapped but largely unexamined in public-facing form.
Enclosures of this kind are among the most common yet least understood monuments in the Irish countryside. The term covers a broad range of features, from the circular earthen banks of a ringfort, which would have enclosed a farmstead in the early medieval period, to later stock enclosures or field boundaries whose precise date and function remain uncertain until excavated or studied in detail. Their very ordinariness is part of what makes them easy to overlook.
Lanmore is a small rural townland, and the enclosure there has been catalogued as a monument, meaning it has been identified from field survey, aerial photography, or mapping as a feature of potential archaeological significance. Beyond that formal recognition, the available detail is thin. The record exists, the site is protected in principle, but the specifics of its form, date, and any associated finds remain to be fully documented or published. Many such sites across Mayo and the wider west of Ireland are earthworks that have survived precisely because the land around them was never intensively developed, leaving low banks and subtle ditches that a careful eye can still trace across a field.