Enclosure, Scregg, Co. Mayo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Scregg, Co. Mayo

On a low ridge running north-west to south-east through the pastures of Scregg in County Mayo, something may or may not exist.

That uncertainty is, in its own way, the most interesting thing about the place. The site has been classified as a possible enclosure in successive heritage surveys, first in 1991 and again in 1997, yet there is no visible trace of any such structure at ground level. The accompanying file note floats the phrase "ritual hill" without elaboration, which raises more questions than it resolves and then leaves them hanging.

What is confirmed on the ridge is a mound barrow, a type of prehistoric funerary monument in which earth or stones are heaped over a burial. The barrow's presence lends some weight to the idea that this elevated ground held significance for the people who worked and lived around it in prehistory. Ridges with long sight lines were frequently chosen for such purposes, and this one does command good views over the surrounding countryside to the north-east where the ground falls away. Whether a formal enclosure, perhaps a roughly circular bank and ditch demarcating a ceremonial or settlement area, ever accompanied the barrow is simply not known. The landscape has been under pasture long enough to erase subtler earthworks entirely, and without excavation or detailed geophysical survey the question is likely to remain open.

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Pete F
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