Enclosure, Roos, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
In Roos, County Mayo, a circular enclosure roughly forty metres across once existed, recorded faithfully on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838 and then, edition by edition, quietly disappearing from the cartographic record.
By the time the 1915 revision was published, the enclosure itself was gone from the map, but a curious kink in a northeast-to-southwest field fence betrayed its former presence, the boundary apparently bending to respect, or simply preserve, the northeast arc of whatever had once stood there. Today, a modern bungalow and its garden occupy the site, and there is no visible trace at ground level.
Circular enclosures of this kind are a common enough feature of the Irish countryside, often the remains of a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built predominantly between the early medieval period and around the twelfth century. They served as domestic settlements, with the earthen bank or stone wall providing a degree of protection for livestock and family. What makes the Roos example quietly interesting is less what survives than what the maps reveal about the pace of erasure. The 1838 Ordnance Survey, one of the most detailed cartographic exercises ever undertaken in Ireland, caught the enclosure at a moment when it was still legible in the landscape. Within decades it had vanished from subsequent editions, though the stubborn deviation in a later field fence suggests the ground held some memory of it even then.