Enclosure, Turlough, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Turlough, Co. Mayo

In a pasture near Turlough in County Mayo, a low earthwork sits on a gentle ridge of ground without ever having appeared on any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps.

That absence alone marks it out. These maps, produced from the 1830s onwards and revised periodically, are among the most thorough records of the Irish rural landscape ever made, and features that escaped them tend to be either genuinely overlooked or difficult to read from ground level. This one is both.

The enclosure takes the form of a D-shaped platform, roughly 36 metres along its north-northeast to south-southwest axis and about 43 metres across, sitting on a low north-south spine of elevated ground. An enclosure of this kind typically describes a defined, enclosed space marked out by earthworks, which here take the form of a broadly sloping, levelled scarp along the curving side. The straight side to the north is now defined by a property fence and hedgerow, with no surface evidence that the original monument continues beyond it. D-shaped or sub-rectangular enclosures appear across Ireland in a variety of periods and functions, from early medieval settlement platforms to enclosures associated with religious or agricultural use, though nothing in the visible remains here points conclusively to any one of those categories. The monument is subject to a preservation order under the National Monuments Acts 1930 to 2014, which at least confirms that its significance has been formally recognised, even if its origins remain unresolved.

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Pete F
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