Enclosure, Bushfield, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
In the limestone grassland of Bushfield, a circular enclosure roughly seventeen metres across appears on an 1838 Ordnance Survey map and then, on every subsequent edition, simply does not.
No earthwork, no raised rim, no scatter of stone survives at ground level today. The site exists now as a cartographic ghost, a feature that the earliest systematic mappers of Ireland considered worth recording but which had already begun its disappearance by the time the surveyors returned.
The enclosure was embanked and circular, a form common across Ireland from the prehistoric period through to the early medieval centuries. Such enclosures were built for any number of purposes: settlement, animal management, ritual use, or as the outer boundary of a more complex farmstead. Without visible remains, it is impossible to say more about this particular example. What the 1838 map does confirm is that something was legible in the landscape at that point, even if only faintly so. Within fifty metres to the west lies a cashel, a type of stone-walled enclosure typically associated with early medieval farmsteads, and the proximity of the two features suggests this corner of Co. Mayo was once a more populated and organised place than its quiet pasture now implies. Whether the embanked enclosure and the cashel were contemporary, or represent different phases of use across a long-occupied patch of ground, is a question the surface alone cannot answer.