Enclosure, Ballinchalla, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
On the eastern shore of Lough Mask in County Mayo, there is an archaeological site that offers nothing to the eye.
No earthwork, no outline in the grass, no stone breaking the surface. Whatever once stood here has been entirely levelled, and the ground gives no indication that anything ever did.
What we know comes from a single cartographic source: an Ordnance Survey map dated 1929, which records a circular platform at this spot on the lakeshore. An enclosure of this kind, typically a roughly circular area defined by an earthen bank or low wall, would have served any number of purposes across the centuries, from a defended farmstead to a ceremonial or ecclesiastical boundary. The circular form was common in early medieval Ireland in particular, and such enclosures are found in considerable numbers across the west of the country. This one, at Ballinchalla, was apparently still legible on the landscape when the surveyors recorded it in the early twentieth century. At some point after that, it was levelled, its profile smoothed away by agricultural work or simple erosion, leaving only the map entry as evidence of its existence.