Enclosure, Lecarrow, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Lecarrow, Co. Mayo

On a ridge in County Mayo, sitting above a waterlogged peat basin, a low ring of loosely piled stones marks the outline of a settlement that someone built, lived in briefly perhaps, and then abandoned several thousand years ago.

What makes this site quietly odd is what the excavations established about the sequence of occupation: the field boundaries came first. Somebody had already divided and organised this landscape before a single stone of the enclosure wall was laid.

The enclosure itself is roughly circular, about 25 metres across, defined by a wall of loosely piled stones and boulders that barely reaches 0.4 metres in height today. It sits in commonage on the ridge, with an associated field system spreading north and westward, and two fulacht fia, the cooking sites characteristic of the Bronze Age in which water was boiled using fire-heated stones, lying roughly 50 metres to the east in the floor of the basin. Excavations carried out in 1994 and 1995 opened three trenches across the interior and perimeter. Inside, archaeologists found stake holes and fragmentary stone features, including what may have been a hearth, suggesting some kind of structure once stood here, though the evidence was too insubstantial to say much with confidence. The finds were more telling: worked flakes of flint, chert, and quartz, along with the butt of a polished stone axe or hammer. The charcoal recovered was too sparse to permit radiocarbon dating, but the material culture points clearly to the Bronze Age. Crucially, the excavation also demonstrated that the boundary wall of the adjoining field system, itself built into a shallow foundation trench, predated the enclosure wall. The fields, in other words, are older than the dwelling, which inverts the assumption that settlement comes before land management.

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