Mound, Cloonfane, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Mound, Cloonfane, Co. Mayo

In the pasture at Cloonfane, County Mayo, there may or may not be a mound.

That ambiguity is, in a way, the whole story. A small circular feature, roughly ten metres across, appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, carefully recorded by surveyors who noted its rounded outline and its position just west of a northwest-to-southeast field boundary. By the time the next major edition was produced in 1920, it had vanished from the cartographic record entirely, replaced or obscured by a farmstead shown on or immediately beside the same spot. Today, nothing is visible at ground level.

What the 1838 surveyors were recording is genuinely uncertain. Circular earthen mounds of around this scale in rural Ireland can represent anything from prehistoric burial monuments to the collapsed remains of later agricultural or enclosure features. The fact that it was bordered by a field boundary suggests it may have been incorporated into the working landscape for some time before the farmstead arrived. Whether it was levelled deliberately, absorbed into building work, or simply eroded beyond recognition over the intervening decades is not known. The gap between the two map editions spans some of the most turbulent years in Irish rural history, including the Famine and its aftermath, when the physical landscape of countless townlands was dramatically reorganised.

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Pete F
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