Enclosure, Steelaun, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
A circular earthwork sitting quietly in pasture near Steelaun has never appeared on any Ordnance Survey map, not on the 1838 edition, nor on the 1922 revision.
That absence alone is unusual. Most features of comparable age and scale were at least sketched by the surveyors who criss-crossed this part of Mayo, yet this one went unrecorded, which raises the question of how much it had already faded from legibility by the time anyone was looking.
The enclosure measures roughly 45.5 metres on its north-west to south-east axis and about 45 metres across the other way, making it a substantial circle even in its degraded state. A sod-covered stony bank defines the south-east to north-west arc, while elsewhere the boundary survives only as a stony scarp, a low slope of tumbled stone rather than a proper upstanding bank. Faint undulations outside the bank to the south and west-north-west may indicate the ghost of a second, outer enclosure, though nothing remains definitive enough to say so with confidence. The overall form is consistent with a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead built in early medieval Ireland, typically between the seventh and tenth centuries, in which a single bank and ditch defined a household's living and working space. Within the interior, close to the bank in the south-east quadrant, is a small sub-rectangular structure about six by seven to ten metres, its low stony bank barely thirty centimetres high and partly obscured by overgrowth and scattered stones. The northern half of the interior holds several concentrations of stone that resist easy interpretation; they may be the remains of internal structures or divisions, or simply accumulated field clearance.
What gives the site an additional layer of interest is its setting within a cluster of similar monuments. Two raths, a rath being another term for a ringfort-type enclosure, lie close by: one approximately 150 metres to the south-west, the other around 120 metres to the south. The ground falls away to the east-south-east toward the mouth of the Palmerstown River, about 400 metres distant, while a ridge rises to the west-north-west to form the horizon. A modern field fence now bisects the enclosure, and a road runs immediately to the east-south-east, meaning the site has been absorbed into the working landscape in a way that makes it easy to overlook, even standing next to it.
