Enclosure, Cappacurry, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Cappacurry, Co. Mayo

In the pasture at Cappacurry, in County Mayo, lies a circular enclosure that exists now only on paper.

It has been levelled entirely, leaving no trace above ground, yet its outline was recorded clearly enough on the Ordnance Survey map of 1838, drawn as a roughly circular feature somewhere between sixty and sixty-five metres in diameter. That map entry is, at this point, the principal evidence that anything was ever there at all.

Circular enclosures of this kind are a familiar presence in the Irish landscape, ranging from prehistoric ring forts and raths, which were typically earthen-banked enclosures used as farmsteads or places of refuge, through to later ecclesiastical or agricultural boundaries. Without excavation it is rarely possible to say with confidence what period a levelled example belongs to, or what it contained. What the 1838 mapping does confirm is that whatever stood at Cappacurry was substantial enough in diameter to merit recording by the surveyors of the day, and that it was still sufficiently intact at that point to be traced. At some stage between then and now, it was removed, most likely through agricultural improvement or land clearance, the kind of gradual erasure that claimed thousands of similar sites across Ireland during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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