Enclosure, Largan, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
On a steep, south-facing ridge slope in Largan, County Mayo, there is an oval earthwork that raises more questions than it answers.
Roughly 36 metres along its longer axis and nearly 29 metres across, it is defined not by a wall but by a scarp, a cut or drop in the ground surface, that reaches two metres in height at its steepest southeastern point, where it merges with a deep, water-carved gully running along the eastern side. A low, dilapidated bank survives on the southwestern arc, and a field ditch skirts the outer base of the scarp before connecting with that same gully. The whole thing is thickly ringed with gorse, hawthorn, and brambles, which gives it a closed, slightly forbidding quality even from a short distance.
What makes this enclosure genuinely puzzling is its interior. The ground slopes sharply downward from north to south, dropping somewhere between two and a half and three metres across the length of the feature. Whoever made it, and whenever they did so, was working with a surface that would have been markedly uncomfortable for everyday habitation. Only two small patches of level ground exist inside, one near the south end and a roughly eight-by-eight-metre area in the northwest quadrant. Faint linear features running north to south in the northern half may be the remains of cultivation ridges, and a ruined drystone field wall crosses the interior slightly west of centre. The enclosure does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, but by the 1919 edition a hachured oval feature is marked on the same spot, suggesting it was at least visible and considered worth recording by the early twentieth century, even if its origins and purpose remained unexplained.