Enclosure, Carrowtrasna, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
On a ridge in Carrowtrasna, County Mayo, an oval earthwork sits quietly in pasture, unnoticed by the Ordnance Survey cartographers who mapped the area in both 1838 and 1922.
That double absence from the historical record is itself worth pausing over. Whatever this structure was, it left no impression on the minds of those surveyors, even as it continued to leave a physical impression on the ground.
The enclosure measures roughly 29 metres east to west and 20.5 metres north to south, its perimeter formed by a sod-covered bank that varies considerably in condition. At the southern arc the bank is most legible, with a more pronounced external slope and a width of around 2.6 metres. Elsewhere it has slumped and eroded, reduced in places to little more than 0.2 metres above the surrounding ground, with stones and occasional boulders protruding at irregular intervals. A field wall following the townland boundary cuts across the western side, truncating the bank and folding the enclosure into the later logic of agricultural division. To the north, the structure connects directly with a second enclosure, the two conjoined in a way that suggests they were either built together or developed in close relation to one another. Enclosures of this kind, essentially a raised earthen boundary defining a roughly circular or oval space, appear across Ireland in a wide range of periods and contexts, from prehistoric farmsteads to early medieval settlements, and without excavation it is difficult to say more about date or function.