Enclosure, Tooreen, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
In the pasture at Tooreen, on a natural terrace above the coastal lowlands of County Mayo, there is an enclosure that no longer exists.
Not in the sense that it has crumbled or been reclaimed by vegetation, but in the most final sense: it was levelled during land reclamation, and today there is no visible trace at ground level. The only evidence that it was ever there lives in two nineteenth and early twentieth-century maps, each of which tells a slightly different story about what it looked like.
The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838 shows a circular enclosure, roughly the size of a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common across early medieval Ireland, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. By the time the revised edition was published in 1922, the same feature was recorded as D-shaped, with a diameter of between 25 and 30 metres, its straight southern edge running alongside a field boundary. Whether the shape changed on the ground between those two surveys, or whether the earlier cartographers simply approximated, is impossible to say now. What the site's position does suggest is that whoever originally built or used it had an eye for terrain: the enclosure sat on a terrace sheltered to the east by a rocky escarpment two to three metres high, and open to the west across a broad sweep of low-lying coastal pasture.