Enclosure, Crocknaraw, Co. Galway

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Crocknaraw, Co. Galway

On a north-facing slope at Crocknaraw in County Galway, a circular enclosure sits quietly on a natural terrace, its low drystone wall wide enough to suggest something more substantial once stood here.

The wall, roughly 2.8 metres across and built in a revetted style, meaning it was faced with stone on at least one side to hold its shape, traces a circle about 24 metres in diameter. A well-defined entrance faces east. None of this is especially dramatic on the surface, but the uncertainty surrounding what the enclosure actually is gives it a particular quality. It looks like a cashel, the term for a stone-walled ringfort typically associated with the early medieval period in Ireland, yet the suspicion is that it may be considerably older than that.

The monument sits around 40 metres north-northwest of a stone pair, a type of prehistoric standing stone arrangement found elsewhere in the same townland. Whether or not these two features are related, their proximity is suggestive. To the south and west of the enclosure, a series of field walls survive beneath the bog, preserved by the very peat that eventually swallowed them. Pre-bog field systems of this kind are often associated with the Bronze Age, when much of the Irish upland and western landscape was being farmed before blanket bog spread across it over subsequent millennia. The enclosure's relationship to those buried walls has not been resolved, but together they point to a landscape that was once considerably more organised and inhabited than its current appearance implies.

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Pete F
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