Enclosure, Townplots, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Townplots, Co. Mayo

On a gentle rise in the drumlin country of County Mayo, a low dome of earth sits largely swallowed by gorse, its original shape compromised by decades of land reclamation.

What survives is modest enough: a circular enclosure of roughly twenty metres in diameter, visible on Ordnance Survey maps as far back as 1838 but now difficult to read in the landscape. The old field boundaries that once framed it to the east and south-east were cleared away to create a single open field, and with them went much of the context that might have helped explain what once stood here.

What makes this unremarkable-looking patch of ground more interesting is the company it keeps. Within a radius of about one hundred metres, the same area contains a wedge tomb, a type of prehistoric megalithic burial monument typically dating from the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age, sitting immediately to the north-west. Nearby are two further enclosures, two possible barrows, which are low earthen burial mounds, and a rath, a ringfort of the kind associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland. Clusters like this, where monuments of different periods accumulate in one area, suggest a landscape that was returned to repeatedly over a very long span of time, valued for reasons that may have included its elevated position and the wide views it offers to the south-east and south-west. Whether the enclosure itself was a settlement, a stock enclosure, or something with a ritual function is no longer clear, and the land reclamation that reshaped this part of Mayo has made it unlikely that the question will ever be fully resolved.

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Pete F
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