Enclosure, Towerhill Demesne, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Towerhill Demesne, Co. Mayo

On the summit of a ridge in the Towerhill Demesne, on the edge of the Ballinrobe district in County Mayo, sits a circular earthwork that is easier to misread than to appreciate.

What looks at first glance like a grassy mound is in fact a raised enclosure, its interior floor sitting roughly a metre and a half above the surrounding ground, ringed by an earthen bank and a shallow external fosse. A fosse, in this context, is simply a defensive or boundary ditch dug around an enclosure of this kind. The whole structure measures 56 metres across in both directions, almost perfectly circular, with a causewayed entrance on the eastern side just over five metres wide, where the ground rises to meet the interior.

The western view from the site is described as commanding, which makes sense when you consider how sharply the ridge drops away in that direction. That elevated, exposed position would have made the enclosure useful for surveillance, for ceremony, or simply for the statement that comes with occupying high ground. What remains today is only a portion of what was once a more elaborate structure. Local knowledge holds that two outer banks were levelled during agricultural clearance at some point, and the southern and western sides of the surviving earthwork show evidence of quarrying. The details were recorded in D. Lavelle's 1994 archaeological survey of the Ballinrobe and Lough Mask and Lough Carra district, but the enclosure itself belongs to a much older tradition of circular raised earthworks found throughout Ireland, the origins and precise functions of which vary from site to site and period to period.

What the visitor encounters now is a site that has been substantially reduced from its original form, the earthen bank low and worn, the fosse shallow. The quarrying scars and the missing outer banks are reminders that agricultural land use has been reshaping monuments like this one for centuries, often leaving just enough to indicate what was there without fully revealing it.

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