Enclosure, Park, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
On a low but commanding hillock in the pastureland of Park, County Mayo, there sits an earthwork that has largely erased itself from the landscape.
What was once recorded as a circular enclosure, roughly twenty to twenty-five metres across, is no longer visible on the ground. The hillock remains, rising several metres with steep, broadly sloping sides and a flat top, but whatever defined its edge as an enclosure has long since disappeared.
The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map captured this feature at a moment when it was still legible, showing a circular enclosure whose southern edge was already being cut into by an east-west road. By the time the 1920 edition of the same map was produced, the enclosure had vanished from the cartographic record entirely. The road, it seems, did its work gradually, shearing the southern side of the hillock and giving it the flattened, D-shaped plan it retains today. Whether the hillock is itself a constructed feature or a natural rise that was at some point adapted and enclosed is unclear; the flat summit, about twenty metres east to west, is consistent with deliberate levelling or use, but no structural trace survives to confirm this. Enclosures of this general type in Ireland range widely in date and function, from early medieval farmsteads to ceremonial or burial sites, and without surviving fabric this one resists easy classification.