Enclosure, Ballinchalla, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
Beneath a working farmyard at Ballinchalla in County Mayo, a circular enclosure lies entirely out of sight.
There are no earthworks to trace with a boot, no upstanding banks, no stones arranged in any pattern a visitor might notice. The ground gives nothing away.
What is known comes from a single source of some age: the Ordnance Survey map of 1838, which recorded a circular enclosure at this spot. Circular enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, typically interpreted as the remains of ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads that served as the basic unit of rural settlement from the early medieval period onwards. By the time the 1838 survey was made, the feature was already clear enough to be mapped, though by the late twentieth century it had left no visible surface traces. A road had cut across its north-eastern edge, and the rest had been absorbed into the farmyard and surrounding pasture. What the enclosure contained, how old it was, and who built it remain open questions.