Enclosure, Cloontumper, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
In a pasture field on a low rise near Cloontumper in County Mayo, there is almost nothing left to see, and that near-absence is precisely what makes the place interesting.
A roughly circular enclosure, somewhere around 33 metres across, once sat on this gentle elevation with open views across undulating ground. It was levelled during land reclamation, and today only the faintest outline remains traceable at ground level, a ghostly ring pressed into the grass.
What is curious about this site is how it appears and disappears across historical mapping. The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838 makes no mention of it, and nor does an earlier edition; but by the 1916 revision, a subcircular enclosure with hachured markings, a cartographic convention used to suggest an earthwork or raised feature, had been recorded, measuring approximately 35 metres east to west and 30 metres north to south. A field boundary running on a north-east to south-west axis crossed it roughly through the centre, suggesting the enclosure had already been partially absorbed into the working landscape by the time it was mapped. Enclosures of this kind, roughly circular earthworks often associated with early medieval settlement or farming activity, are common across the Irish countryside, though the majority have suffered exactly this fate, reduced by successive generations of agricultural improvement until only a crop mark or a slight unevenness in the ground gives them away.