Enclosure, Lissaniska, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
In a rough corner of rush-grown pasture in Lissaniska, County Mayo, the landscape holds the faint memory of a structure that has all but ceased to exist.
What survives is a curving section of field fence, about sixteen metres long and engulfed in overgrowth, alongside a shallow depression running along its outer edge. Together, these modest remnants appear to preserve the southern to north-western arc of what was once a circular embanked enclosure, the kind of earthwork, typically defined by a raised bank and an outer ditch or fosse, that appears across the Irish countryside in various forms and periods.
The enclosure itself was already gone by the time anyone thought to look closely. The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the earliest systematic cartographic surveys of the Irish countryside, recorded it clearly: a circular feature some twenty to twenty-five metres in diameter, its western edge clipped by a north-south field boundary and its northern arc absorbed into a townland boundary. By later map editions it had vanished from the record entirely, having been levelled at some point in the intervening years. That townland boundary, however, still traces a very shallow curve at the northern side, a ghostly echo of the original circuit. The surviving fence section is constructed of earth and stone, though the overgrowth makes a thorough examination difficult, and the fosse-like depression outside it is only about forty centimetres deep, subtle enough to be easily overlooked.
What makes this site quietly interesting is less what remains than how it persists. The enclosure was absorbed into the working geometry of the fields around it, its boundary repurposed as a property line, its form partially erased and partially preserved by the ordinary business of farming. The 1838 map catches it at a moment before that process was complete, making the comparison between that early survey and the present-day ground all the more telling.