Enclosure, Loughaclerybeg, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
In the flat pastureland of Loughaclerybeg, a low circular bank traces a ring roughly 26 metres across.
It is easy to miss, and that is rather the point. The bank is degraded to the point where it barely announces itself above the surrounding grass, and a later field wall has been driven straight through the south-western arc, indifferent to whatever came before it.
Circular enclosures of this kind are among the most common, and most quietly debated, features in the Irish countryside. They are generally understood as the remains of ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads that defined rural settlement across Ireland from roughly the early medieval period onwards. A bank of earth, sometimes accompanied by a ditch, would have enclosed a family's dwelling and perhaps their livestock, offering a degree of security and marking out a household's territory in the landscape. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation, though many, like this one, have been worn down by centuries of agriculture until only a faint swell in the ground remains. The intrusion of the field wall at the south-west is a common fate, reflecting generations of farmers working the land without particular regard for what lay beneath their boundaries.