Enclosure, Tullynahoo, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Tullynahoo, Co. Mayo

In a pasture field at Tullynahoo in County Mayo, the ground holds the faint memory of something that no longer quite exists.

A subtle rise in the earth, roughly eight to ten metres across, is likely all that remains of a small circular enclosure, a feature that had already been levelled by the time anyone thought to look closely at it. What makes its disappearance particularly traceable is a single cartographic moment: the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838 recorded it clearly, a neat circle on the landscape, but later map editions show nothing at all. Somewhere between that first survey and the surveys that followed, the enclosure was gone.

Circular enclosures of this kind are common enough across the Irish countryside that they rarely attract much attention, yet each one represents a deliberate act of boundary-making, whether for a dwelling, a farmstead, or some form of enclosure associated with early medieval settlement. At around ten metres in diameter, this one was modest, closer in scale to a small domestic ring-enclosure than a substantial ringfort. The 1838 Ordnance Survey mapping, carried out as part of a systematic effort to document Ireland's townlands and physical features in extraordinary detail, caught it at what may have been its final moment of visibility. By the time the revision came, the enclosure had been absorbed back into agricultural land, and a modern house and garden now occupy the ground immediately to its east.

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Pete F
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