Enclosure, Cappulcorragh, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
In the hilly pasture of Cappulcorragh, a curving drystone wall traces a broad C-shape across sloping ground, and the question it raises is deceptively simple: what exactly is it?
At first glance, the oval outline and substantial stonework might suggest a ringfort or cashel, the kind of enclosed farmstead that dots the Irish landscape from the early medieval period. But the evidence here does not support that reading. What survives is more likely a field enclosure, probably dating to the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, whose unusual curved form was not the product of ritual or defence but simply of ground that refused to lie flat.
The enclosure measures roughly 51.5 metres east to west and a similar distance north to south, defined by a drystone wall up to 1.6 metres wide and standing about two metres on its outer face at the western end. The interior slopes downward from south to north, and the wall itself is not uniform: the southern section has dropped to between half a metre and 0.7 metres, while the northern arc has vanished entirely at ground level. By the time the Ordnance Survey recorded the area on its six-inch map in 1838, the oval outline was already incorporated into a broader system of field walls; by the 1920 edition, the northern arc had been removed, and straight field walls had taken its place. That sequence tells something about how the landscape was reorganised over time, the older curvilinear boundary gradually absorbed and overwritten by the more regular rectilinear layout that now defines the fields on a northwest to southeast axis.