Enclosure, Tobernashee, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Tobernashee, Co. Mayo

On a west-facing slope in Tobernashee, County Mayo, there is a circular patch of conifers roughly 27 metres across that marks where an ancient enclosure used to be.

The trees were not planted for timber. They occupy the ghost of something older, a slightly raised sub-circular area that is all that remains after the enclosure beneath it was levelled during land reclamation.

When the site was recorded in 1990, it was still legible, if barely. Surveyors working from Lavelle's 1994 catalogue described an oval earthen enclosure measuring 33 metres north to south and 26 metres east to west, set among outcrops and dense scrub. The enclosing bank stood only 0.3 metres high, its western side cluttered with loose stone and its eastern edge already obscured beneath a later field fence. Enclosures of this kind, defined by an earthen bank and sometimes an internal ditch, are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, often associated with early medieval settlement or with the organisation of agricultural land, though their precise age and function can rarely be determined without excavation. This one did not survive long enough for that. By the time Richard Crumlish revisited and described the site in 2010, the bank itself was gone, and what remained was little more than a faint rise in the ground, its outline softened by conifer planting.

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