Enclosure, Slievemore, Co. Mayo

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Slievemore, Co. Mayo

On the lower south-western slope of Slievemore, one of Achill Island's most prominent ridges, there is a wall that barely qualifies as a wall.

It rises to about thirty centimetres, runs for roughly four metres in a shallow curve, and is so thoroughly swallowed by sedge and heather that it can only be traced with patience. What exactly it once enclosed, nobody can say with certainty.

The structure sits in rough upland bog on the north-western reaches of Achill Island, a landscape of worked peat and weather-scoured stone. The wall itself is crudely built, one to two stones wide and one to two stones high, using whatever local material came to hand. Its curved alignment, running roughly east to south-west, suggests it may be the remnant of a small enclosure, though the evidence is fragmentary enough that the identification remains tentative. About sixty metres to the south there is an area of worked bog, and just 1.8 metres away stands a cairn, a mound of stones that in Irish archaeology can mark anything from a burial to a boundary to a cleared field. The proximity of the two features hints at a landscape that was, at some point, organised and purposeful, even if the nature of that organisation has long since dissolved into the bog.

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Pete F
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