Enclosure, Lurga, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
In a quiet stretch of pasture in Lurga, County Mayo, there is a site that no longer exists in any form that the eye can register.
The ground is flat, the grass unbroken, and nothing rises from the soil to suggest that anything was ever here. Yet the maps say otherwise, and that gap between the cartographic record and the physical landscape is the whole story.
The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the most thorough and detailed surveys of the Irish countryside ever undertaken, makes no mention of any feature at this location. By the time the 1920 edition was produced, however, a circular enclosed area had appeared, roughly twenty metres in diameter, sitting alongside a laneway on its northern edge and absorbed along its north-eastern to south-eastern arc into an existing field boundary. An enclosure of this kind, a roughly circular defined area set apart from the surrounding land, could have served any number of purposes across Irish history, from early medieval settlement to later agricultural use, though nothing in the surviving record specifies what this one was for. At some point after 1920, land reclamation work levelled it entirely. A small river runs approximately three hundred metres to the east, and the gently undulating pasture gives no clue that the terrain once held anything of note.