Enclosure, Strade, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Enclosures
Near the village of Strade in County Mayo, an ancient enclosure sits in the landscape with little fanfare and fewer answers.
Enclosures of this kind, typically circular or oval boundaries defined by earthen banks, ditches, or stone walls, appear across Ireland in enormous variety, ranging from prehistoric farmsteads to early medieval ringforts used as defended homesteads by farming families. What makes this particular example quietly compelling is precisely how little is currently documented about it, leaving its age, function, and history suspended in a kind of official uncertainty.
Strade itself carries considerable historical weight. The village is best known for Strade Friary, a medieval Franciscan house founded in the thirteenth century and later transferred to the Dominicans, whose ruined church contains some of the finest medieval sculpture in Connacht. It is also the birthplace of Michael Davitt, the land reform campaigner who founded the Land League in 1879, and a small museum in the village commemorates his life. Whether the enclosure has any relationship to this longer human story of settlement and agriculture in the area remains, for now, an open question.