Enclosure, Mám Trasna, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Mám Trasna, Co. Mayo

Mám Trasna is a mountain pass cutting through the Joyce Country on the Mayo and Galway border, a landscape better known for a notorious mass murder in 1882 than for its archaeology.

Somewhere in that high, spare terrain sits a recorded enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or rectangular boundary, built from stone or earthen banks, that farming and pastoral communities raised across Ireland from the prehistoric period well into the medieval era. Enclosures served many purposes depending on their age and context: corralling animals, defining a settlement, protecting a homestead, or marking out ground with a ritual or communal significance. The fact that one has been formally recorded at Mám Trasna places it in a long chain of human activity across a pass that people have been moving through for millennia.

Beyond its location and its classification, very little can be said with confidence about this particular structure at present. The source material available offers no detail on its dimensions, its probable date, its state of preservation, or how it relates to other features in the surrounding landscape. Mám Trasna and the Lough Mask shoreline below it have a complicated and layered history, from early Gaelic landholding through the clearances and evictions of the nineteenth century, but whether this enclosure connects to any of those layers, or sits in a far earlier stratum altogether, remains an open question. Sometimes a recorded site is simply a coordinate on a map and a category, waiting for fieldwork or closer study to give it a story.

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Pete F
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