Enclosure, Kilbride, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
Some places are known only because a map once said they were there.
In a pasture at Kilbride in County Mayo, a circular embanked enclosure, roughly fifteen metres in diameter, was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837 and then, on every subsequent edition, simply vanished. There is no visible trace at ground level today. The only suggestion of something beneath the turf is a slight rise in the field, the kind of gentle swelling that a person might walk across without a second thought.
An embanked enclosure of this type would typically be a roughly circular area defined by an earthen bank, possibly the remains of a ringfort or similar early settlement feature, though without excavation it is impossible to say more about its origins or purpose. What the 1837 map does preserve is a sense of the landscape it sat within: an old east-west road or trackway ran immediately to its south, a farmyard lay beyond that, and a field boundary ran along its western side on a northeast-to-southwest alignment. These details suggest a site that was already embedded in a working agricultural landscape by the time the early Ordnance surveyors came through. The disappearance from later map editions most likely reflects the gradual levelling of the earthwork through continued farming, a process that was common across Ireland during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A second enclosure has been recorded approximately sixty metres to the north, which hints that this small corner of Kilbride was once more densely marked by these features than the present field surface would suggest.