Enclosure, Sranalaghta, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
On the western edge of the townland of Sranalaghta in County Mayo, something that once occupied a modest but distinct presence in the landscape has entirely vanished.
No earthwork, no rise in the ground, no shadow in the grass gives any indication that a significant enclosure ever stood here, yet maps from two different centuries recorded it clearly enough.
The 1838 Ordnance Survey showed a circular enclosure of ringfort proportions on this gently elevated pasture ground, and the 1922 edition depicted it again, this time as a broadly oval hachured enclosure measuring roughly 35 metres northeast to southwest and 40 metres northwest to southeast. A rath is a type of early medieval earthwork enclosure, typically circular and defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, often interpreted as a farmstead of some status. Whether this particular example was a true rath or something else entirely remains uncertain, hence its cautious classification as a possible rath. At some point between the last time it was mapped and the present, it was levelled completely. The ground now gives nothing back. About 150 metres to the northeast, a confirmed rath survives, which at least suggests this was once a landscape with more than one such enclosure in reasonably close proximity.
There is nothing to see at the site itself, and that absence is, in its own way, the point. The two historic maps together trace a quiet disappearance, a feature that was real enough to be surveyed twice, across nearly a century, and is now lost to pasture.
