Earthwork, Lagcurragh, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Earthwork, Lagcurragh, Co. Mayo

On the north-western edge of Swinford town, a low grass-covered mound sits on the slope of a small knoll in pastureland, partly screened by hawthorn bushes.

It measures somewhere between nine and ten metres at its widest and rises to about 1.6 metres, which is not especially imposing, but what gives it a quietly awkward status in the archaeological record is that nobody is entirely certain what it is, or whether it matters at all.

The earliest cartographic evidence comes from the 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which shows a trapezoidal shaded feature at this location, roughly twenty to thirty metres east to west and fifteen to twenty metres north to south, suggesting the earthwork was once considerably more substantial than what survives today. By the time the 1919 edition of the same map was produced, the feature had disappeared from the cartography altogether, which points to significant disturbance in the intervening decades. The mound was eventually brought back to archaeological attention through an aerial photograph, in which it appears as an irregular raised form in the field. It was recorded in the Sites and Monuments Record in 1991 and the Record of Monuments and Places in 1997 on that basis. The surviving remains are heavily quarried and disturbed, and the original form of the earthwork, whether it was a burial mound, a field boundary feature, or something else entirely, remains unresolved.

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Pete F
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