Enclosure, Cuilmore, Co. Mayo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Cuilmore, Co. Mayo

On the higher eastern end of a ridge in Cuilmore, County Mayo, there is a site that exists more convincingly on paper than it does underfoot.

A sub-circular enclosure roughly 25 metres in diameter was recorded here on Ordnance Survey maps in both 1837 and 1919, yet today there is nothing visible at ground level. Whatever once defined its boundary, whether an earthen bank, a ditch, or some combination of the two, has been entirely erased from the landscape.

The enclosure is classified as a possible rath, the term used for a circular or near-circular earthwork enclosure, typically dating from the early medieval period and most often associated with farmsteads or settlement sites of some status. The fact that it occupied the highest point of the ridge, with the commanding views that position would have offered, fits that pattern reasonably well. By the time anyone was systematically noting such things, it had already begun to disappear. Quarrying on the southern slope of the ridge immediately below the enclosure's recorded location has likely accelerated or contributed to that loss. Some 75 metres to the west, on the same ridge top, a second rath survives and remains a distinct, separate monument. The two sites, so close to one another, suggest this particular stretch of elevated ground carried some significance in the early medieval landscape, even if one half of that story has now been physically removed from it.

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