Post row - peatland, Cloghbrack Far, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Ritual/Ceremonial
On the southern shoreline of Lough More in County Mayo, two wooden posts stand just 0.4 metres apart in the peatland.
One is hazel, the other birch. That is more or less the entirety of what is visible, and yet the pair constitutes a formally recorded archaeological monument, a quiet reminder that wetland archaeology often deals in fragments rather than spectacles. What makes such features worth recording is precisely their modesty: wooden posts survive in waterlogged and peaty ground in ways they simply do not in drier conditions, and even two posts in alignment can indicate a jetty, a fish trap, a walkway, or some boundary long since dissolved into the bog.
The posts were recorded in 1992 during a survey carried out by the Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit, a body tasked with identifying and documenting monuments in and around Irish lakes and wetlands before drainage, erosion, or development could claim them. The findings were later published by Jennings in 1995. The monument is catalogued under the reference MA-CBF 0006. No dating has been specified in available records, which is itself characteristic of this kind of find: without dendrochronology or radiocarbon analysis, two posts in a bog can sit anywhere across several millennia of human activity around Irish lakeshores.