Enclosure, Lissaniska, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
In a Mayo pasture, a circular enclosure that once crowned the top of a low rise has almost entirely ceased to exist.
What remains is less a monument than a suggestion: a faint outline, roughly fifteen metres across, that blurs at its edges into the natural curve of the ground beneath it. To look at it now, you would be hard pressed to call it anything in particular.
The site appears clearly enough on the 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, recorded as a circular enclosure with a diameter of around twenty-five metres. Enclosures of this kind, often called ring forts or raths, were among the most common settlement forms in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a raised earthen bank enclosing a domestic or agricultural space. By the time the revised edition of the map was produced in 1917, only a semi-circular hachured feature was shown, suggesting that levelling had already been underway for some decades. The intervening years removed whatever remained. The discrepancy between the twenty-five-metre diameter recorded in 1838 and the fifteen-metre outline still faintly visible today may reflect how much has been lost, or simply the difficulty of reading a feature that has merged so thoroughly with the rise it once defined.