Enclosure, Ballyglass, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyglass, Co. Galway

In the undulating pastureland of Ballyglass in north County Galway, a circular earthwork about thirty metres across sits quietly being consumed by vegetation.

It is defined not by a wall or a ditch in any obvious sense, but by a scarp, a low slope or drop in the ground surface, the kind of feature that registers more clearly underfoot than to the eye. A field boundary, almost certainly of much later date, cuts straight through the monument at its eastern and western edges, the workaday logic of agricultural land division showing no particular deference to whatever came before.

Circular enclosures of this kind are relatively common across Ireland, though their functions varied considerably. Some were ringforts, the farmsteads of early medieval families enclosed for security and status. Others served ritual or ceremonial purposes in the prehistoric period. Without excavation, it is rarely possible to say which category any given example belongs to, and this one, given over largely to dense overgrowth, has not yielded that kind of clarity. What it does offer is the quiet strangeness of a boundary that has outlasted its original meaning, a roughly circular argument in the landscape that the land itself has almost finished absorbing.

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Pete F
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