Enclosure, Rinnananny, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
In the townland of Rinnananny, in the quiet interior of County Mayo, there is a scheduled ancient enclosure that has so far resisted easy description.
The word "enclosure" covers a broad family of monuments in Irish archaeology, from the circular earthen banks of a ringfort, which would have protected a family farmstead in the early medieval period, to the ditched boundaries of a hilltop ceremonial site going back millennia. Which of these Rinnananny belongs to remains, for now, genuinely unclear, at least in any publicly available form. That ambiguity is itself a kind of interest. The monument is recorded and recognised, plotted on maps and assigned a classification, and yet the particulars of what a person would actually see standing beside it have not yet made it into the public record.