Enclosure, Lisnagree, Co. Galway

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Lisnagree, Co. Galway

In the fields around Lisnagree in north County Galway, there is an archaeological site that no longer exists in any visible sense.

A circular enclosure roughly forty metres across was recorded here, the kind of earthwork, typically a raised or embanked ring, that in Ireland most often marks the site of an early medieval farmstead. Nothing of it can be seen today at ground level. The field, to all appearances, is simply a field.

What we know comes from a single cartographic moment. The third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1932, shows the enclosure marked on level ground, suggesting it was still discernible, at least to a surveyor's eye, in the early twentieth century. By the time the site was formally catalogued in the Archaeological Inventory of County Galway, compiled by Olive Alcock, Kathy de hÓra, and Paul Gosling and published in 1999, no surface trace survived. The enclosure had been absorbed back into the landscape, most likely through decades of ploughing, drainage work, or general agricultural improvement. That 1932 map record is now the closest thing it has to a biography.

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Pete F
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