Enclosure, Levallyroe, Co. Mayo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Levallyroe, Co. Mayo

On a hilltop in Levallyroe, County Mayo, there is an enclosure that exists more on paper than on the ground.

Walk the field today and you will find pasture, a gentle summit, and a small quarry pit at the south-eastern edge; the earthwork itself has vanished entirely from the surface. What makes this site quietly compelling is precisely that absence, and what the maps reveal about what was once there.

The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded a roughly circular embanked enclosure crowning the level top of the hill. A rath, as these enclosures are generally known, is a raised earthen ringfort, typically of early medieval date, built to enclose a farmstead or small settlement. By the time the 1916 edition of the same map was produced, the picture had already changed: the enclosure was shown as D-shaped rather than circular, measuring approximately 36 metres north to south and 39 metres east to west, with the straight eastern side cut off by a field boundary. That intervening seventy-odd years had done enough to alter, or at least to alter the recorded appearance of, a structure that had presumably stood for centuries. A second rath sits about 200 metres to the south-east, still visible where this one is not, suggesting the hilltop and its surrounds were once a more populated landscape than the current emptiness implies. The meandering river to the north and Levally Lough to the south-east complete a setting that would have made the elevated position practical as well as defensible.

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Pete F
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