Enclosure, Rathscanlan, Co. Mayo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Rathscanlan, Co. Mayo

At Rathscanlan in County Mayo, a circular enclosure has almost entirely vanished from the ground, yet it refuses to disappear completely.

Flattened at some point in the past, it survives only as a cropmark, a narrow band of differential grass growth roughly 1.3 metres wide that traces the ghost of what was probably an enclosing ditch. The circle it describes measures approximately 29 metres east to west and 28.5 metres north to south, sitting at the break of a steep east-facing slope that drops away into a small stream valley running north to south.

The enclosure had gone unrecorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837, which is itself telling. By the 1919 edition of the same map it had been marked as a circular enclosure with a solid outline, and a later twenty-five-inch plan shows trees growing inside it. The structure belongs to a category of enclosed sites found widely across Ireland, typically interpreted as ringforts or related settlement enclosures, though without excavation the precise function and date of this one remain open questions. What is slightly unusual here is the topography it occupies: the western two thirds of the interior sat on level ground, while the eastern third dropped sharply by around 2.5 metres down the slope, an awkward arrangement for any kind of domestic use. About 100 metres to the north-north-west, a similarly sized enclosure has also been recorded, which raises the possibility that the two sites were in some way related, whether as paired settlements, successive phases of use, or simply neighbours drawing on the same landscape.

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Pete F
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