Enclosure, Knockatee, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
On the summit of a hill in Galway's rolling pastureland, there was once a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres across.
Most of it has vanished. What survives is a single quadrant, the north-eastern arc, defined by a scarp, a low earthen slope or cut edge marking where a boundary once ran. The rest of the circuit has left no visible trace above ground, meaning that anyone walking across the hilltop today would have no clear sense of the structure's original extent without knowing where to look.
The enclosure was recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which places its documentation in the nineteenth century, and it appears in Neary's 1914 survey of the area. What kind of enclosure it was originally is not specified in the available record. Such circular earthworks in Ireland range in date and function from prehistoric ring-forts, known as raths or ringforts and typically used as enclosed farmsteads, to later ecclesiastical or ceremonial boundaries. The interior of this one is occupied by a ceallúnach, a type of informal burial ground, sometimes called a children's burial ground, where unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground were interred. These sites, found across Ireland, often cluster around older earthworks or elevated ground, and their use frequently continued into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Immediately to the south of the main enclosure, a second curving platform defined by a similar scarp has been noted; its relationship to the enclosure is uncertain, though the two features may be part of the same original arrangement.