Enclosure, Kilquire, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Kilquire, Co. Mayo

In the pasture fields of Kilquire in County Mayo, a stone enclosure once sat quietly in the landscape, and then, at some point during land reclamation works, it was levelled out of existence.

Or nearly so. Aerial photographs taken in 1970 captured it while it still registered clearly from above: a subcircular enclosure roughly 30 metres in diameter, with an internal wall dividing the space along a roughly east-west axis, and a small square structure, somewhere between 5 and 8 metres across, pressed up against the outer wall at the south-east. What the camera recorded, the ground subsequently lost.

The site was identified as a possible cashel, the Irish term for a stone-walled ringfort, a type of early medieval farmstead enclosure common across Ireland but variable enough in form that individual examples can be difficult to classify with certainty. The internal division and the small abutting structure are details that hint at organised domestic or agricultural use, though nothing has been excavated here to confirm what purpose either served. A survey of Ballinrobe and district carried out in 1994 noted a circular mound of earth and stone in the same area, measuring roughly 14 metres north to south, 13 metres east to west, and standing about 2.4 metres high. The surveyors considered it most likely a field clearance heap, the kind of accumulated debris that results when stones are gathered off agricultural land over generations, rather than any deliberately constructed monument. Whether the two features are directly related is not recorded.

What makes the site worth noting now is a small persistence. More recent aerial views suggest that the little square structure at the south-east of the enclosure has survived, even as the main enclosure itself was lost to reclamation. It sits, presumably, somewhere within the current field system, incorporated and unremarked, visible mainly to anyone looking down from a considerable height.

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Pete F
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