Enclosure, Doon, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Doon, Co. Galway

In the hilly farmland around Doon in north County Galway, there is a place on a map that no longer exists on the ground.

The Ordnance Survey six-inch sheets, those meticulous mid-nineteenth century documents that recorded Ireland's landscape in extraordinary detail, marked a circular enclosure here with a diameter of roughly twenty metres. Today, nothing remains to be seen. No earthwork, no rise in the field, no faint crop mark visible from the lane. The site survives only as a cartographic ghost.

Circular enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish countryside. They are generally understood to be the remains of ringforts, known in Irish as ráth or lios, which served as enclosed farmsteads from roughly the early medieval period onwards, though some may be considerably older. A diameter of around twenty metres places this one at the smaller end of the scale, suggesting a modest agricultural settlement rather than a site of any particular status. What the OS surveyors recorded in the nineteenth century was presumably already much reduced, the earthen bank worn low by centuries of ploughing and grazing. At some point between that survey and the present, whatever remained was lost entirely to the land.

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