Enclosure, Lugganashlere, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
In the townland of Lugganashlere, in County Mayo, there is an enclosure old enough to have been catalogued as an archaeological monument, yet quiet enough that almost nothing about it has made it into public record.
That absence is itself a kind of fact. Mayo is dense with ancient enclosures, the circular or sub-circular boundaries of earth and stone that once defined a farmstead, a defended settlement, or a ritual space. They are common enough that many go unvisited and unstudied for decades, their interiors smoothed by grazing and their banks softened by centuries of weather.
An enclosure, in the archaeological sense, is simply a defined area enclosed by a bank, ditch, wall, or some combination of these, and they occur across Ireland from the Bronze Age through the early medieval period and beyond. The specific character of the Lugganashlere example, its date, its dimensions, whether it was domestic or ceremonial in function, remains unrecorded in any publicly accessible form at present. The townland name itself is worth a moment's attention. Lugganashlere likely derives from Irish, as most Mayo placenames do, and such names often encode a feature of the landscape, a hollow, a stream, a type of ground, that was important enough to the people who lived there to be preserved in the name long after its original significance was forgotten.