Enclosure, Curraboy, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
In a corner of south Mayo where the ground sits low and water tends to linger, a faint rectangular outline marks something that nobody has yet managed to explain.
The earthen bank that defines it rises only half a metre above the surrounding pasture, easy to miss and easier still to dismiss, yet it encloses a space roughly 42 metres north to south and 23 metres east to west, a footprint large enough to suggest deliberate purpose rather than accident of landscape.
What that purpose was remains genuinely open. The enclosure sits in low-lying ground liable to flooding, which complicates the usual guesses. Earthen enclosures of this kind appear throughout Ireland across a very wide span of time, from prehistoric farmsteads to early medieval ringforts to post-medieval field boundaries, and without excavation or associated finds it is impossible to assign this one to any period. The bank has been partly levelled along its eastern and southern sides, so either time or agricultural activity has been at work here, quietly erasing whatever profile it once had. Its antiquity, as the phrase goes, is unknown.