Enclosure, Treanlaur, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Treanlaur, Co. Mayo

On a rough, heather-grown slope in Treanlaur, Co. Mayo, there is a low circular wall that nobody can quite explain.

It is roughly 21 to 23 metres across, built from drystone, incorporating large boulders in places, and so thoroughly swallowed by blackthorn, hawthorn, brambles, and ferns that a proper inspection has proved difficult. What makes it curious is not what it is, but what it probably is not.

The enclosure is absent from the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, which is significant. When the OS teams moved systematically across Ireland in the 1830s, they were fairly diligent about recording older earthworks and enclosures, so the omission suggests the feature either did not yet exist or was too ambiguous to warrant inclusion. By the 1922 edition, it appears as a polygonal walled enclosure, absorbed into the surrounding system of field walls. The wall itself, measuring between 0.4 and 0.6 metres wide, rises to about 1.1 metres on its outer southern face but barely 0.2 metres internally on the eastern side, where the ground slopes gently downward. A loose pile of field clearance stones has been dumped against its outer western face. All of this points away from any ancient origin. A cashel, which is a type of early medieval stone ringfort, would typically have a far more substantial wall than this one; the construction here is simply too slight to support that reading. The most plausible interpretation is a field enclosure of 18th or 19th century date, a modest piece of agricultural organisation on marginal land, built and later abandoned as farming patterns shifted. Several large boulders are visible beneath the overgrowth in the interior, though dense vegetation has prevented any clearer picture of what lies inside.

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Pete F
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