Enclosure, Carrownderry, Co. Galway

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Carrownderry, Co. Galway

In the undulating grassland of Carrownderry, a low bank traces the rough outline of a subcircular enclosure, measuring about 37.5 metres north to south and 35.5 metres east to west.

It is poorly preserved, partly because a later field wall has been laid directly across it from the north-west to the north-east, blurring the boundary between ancient earthwork and agricultural tidying. This kind of enclosure is a familiar but still poorly understood feature of the Irish landscape, the remnant of a ring-shaped earthen boundary that once defined a farmstead, a ceremonial space, or some other enclosed area of human activity. What makes this particular example quietly interesting is not the enclosure itself, which survives only just, but what has accumulated around it.

Abutting the southern bank is a rectangular structure measuring roughly 21 metres east to west and 9 metres north to south. Local tradition holds that this was an old school house, a use that would place it within the broader story of hedge schools and rural education in the west of Ireland, where teaching often took place in whatever buildings came to hand. Whether the structure predates, postdates, or was built with deliberate reference to the enclosure bank is not recorded. About 50 metres to the north-east lies a feature known locally as the Wicked Tree, a place-name that carries its own suggestion of folklore or local memory. The two sites sit in close proximity, and that clustering, an ancient earthwork, a possible school, and a tree with an unsettling name, gives the landscape here a layered quality that the plain grassland does little to advertise.

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Pete F
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