Enclosure, Sraheens, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Sraheens, Co. Mayo

In a pasture field at Sraheens in County Mayo, a slight rise in the ground is almost all that remains of a structure that managed to disappear twice: once from the landscape, and once, very nearly, from the record.

What survives is a low, circular mounding of earth, roughly twenty to twenty-two metres across, sitting about twenty metres west of a stream. Without knowing what to look for, you would walk straight past it.

The structure is described as a possible enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or oval boundary, typically defined by a stone wall or earthen bank, that appears across the Irish countryside in considerable numbers and dates to various periods, often early medieval. This particular example was not recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, which makes its origins harder to pin down. By 1919, however, it had been mapped, and an aerial photograph captured it as a C-shaped area measuring somewhere between twenty-five and thirty metres along its northwest-to-southeast axis. A curving element, most likely a stone wall, defined it from the southeast around to the north, with the northeastern side left open. Part of that wall had already been absorbed into a straight field boundary by the time the photograph was taken, a common fate for older structural remains as agricultural land was reorganised. At some point after that documentation, land reclamation removed what was left above ground. The slightly raised area that persists today is, in all likelihood, the last physical trace of where the enclosure once stood.

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Pete F
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