Mary Skerrett's Mount, Johnstown, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
In the townland of Johnstown in County Galway, a place carries a woman's name without carrying much else.
Mary Skerrett's Mount is, by any physical measure, no longer there. No mound rises from the ground, no earthwork suggests what once stood, and anyone walking the land today would have no reason to pause. What survives is the name, and the name alone is enough to raise questions that the landscape itself cannot answer.
The earliest Ordnance Survey mapping of Ireland, the six-inch series produced in the mid-nineteenth century, recorded the site as a small circular enclosure or mound roughly twenty metres in diameter. Such features were common across the Irish countryside, the remnants of ringforts, burial mounds, or other earthworks whose original purposes have often blurred over centuries of agricultural use and neglect. By the time the third edition of the same map series was produced in 1930, the feature had vanished from the record entirely, though the name Mary Skerrett's Mount persisted, now attached to a different monument some 450 metres to the south-south-east. How a place-name migrates across the landscape in the space of a few decades is itself a small puzzle. It may reflect local memory drifting as the original feature disappeared, or simply a cartographer's reasonable but imprecise attempt to anchor a familiar name to something still visible. Either way, the original site left no surface trace, and the name is the only evidence that it existed at all.
Who Mary Skerrett was remains unclear from what survives. The Skerrett family were a notable presence in Connacht, particularly around Galway town, for several centuries, but no record directly connects this particular woman to this particular mound. The attachment of a personal name to a landscape feature suggests local significance of some kind, whether ownership, association, or folklore, but that meaning has not been preserved alongside the name itself.