Enclosure, Lenaloughra, Co. Galway

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Lenaloughra, Co. Galway

At Lenaloughra in County Galway, a circular enclosure roughly sixty metres across once occupied a patch of level grassland.

It was recorded on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map in 1933, noted clearly enough to be mapped, yet by the time anyone came to look for it on the ground, almost nothing remained. A faint scarp running from the north-east around through the east to the south-south-east, and the arc of a fosse, a shallow defensive ditch, curving from the south-south-east through south to the north-north-west, are the only traces still detectable. The rest has been absorbed back into the field.

Enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological monuments in Ireland, typically associated with early medieval settlement, though their dates and functions vary considerably. A circular enclosure of sixty metres would be a modest but plausible example of a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead that housed rural families across the island from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. What makes Lenaloughra quietly notable is not what survives but what does not. Within living memory of the 1933 survey it was sufficiently visible to map; now it exists mainly as an entry in an inventory and a pair of nearly imperceptible earthwork traces. The grassland has won.

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