Enclosure, Mirehill, Co. Galway

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Mirehill, Co. Galway

In a field at Mirehill in north County Galway, the ground quietly gives way to the outline of something old.

A subcircular enclosure, roughly 39 metres north to south and 37 metres east to west, announces itself not through standing walls or dramatic earthworks but through a scarp, essentially a slope cut into the ground, and an external fosse, a shallow ditch, running from the south-southwest around through the west to the north-northeast. The rest of the perimeter has left no visible trace on the surface at all. It is the kind of monument that rewards attention rather than spectacle.

The enclosure sits some 220 metres northeast of a ringfort, the familiar circular defended farmstead of early medieval Ireland, and the two monuments together suggest a landscape that was once more deliberately organised than its present agricultural appearance implies. A cashel-type building, the associated structure recorded alongside the enclosure, points to some form of habitation or activity within or near the defined space. Today, a laneway cuts through the monument at its northeast and southwest, and two field walls radiate outward from it to the west, evidence that later farming activity worked around and through whatever this place once was. A pile of field-clearance rubble has accumulated inside the eastern part of the interior, the kind of casual accumulation that happens over generations when stones need somewhere to go and an old earthwork provides a convenient boundary.

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Pete F
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