Enclosure, Garbally Demesne, Co. Galway

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Garbally Demesne, Co. Galway

On a low hillock in the undulating grassland of Garbally Demesne in County Galway, there is almost nothing left to see, and that near-absence is precisely what makes the spot worth remarking on.

What was once a rath, an earthen ringfort of the kind built across Ireland during the early medieval period as a defended farmstead or settlement enclosure, has been levelled. What remains is a slightly raised, subtly circular patch of ground, measuring roughly fifty metres east to west and forty-six metres north to south, faintly distinct from the surrounding pasture only if you know to look.

The Ordnance Survey six-inch map from 1945 to 1946 recorded the feature clearly enough: a roughly oval enclosure, approximately forty metres on its north to south axis and thirty metres east to west. That cartographic record is now among the most concrete evidence that anything was ever here. According to local information gathered before the monument's disappearance, the site was known locally as a rath, and its clearance had happened only recently relative to when it was surveyed for the Archaeological Inventory of County Galway. The precise timing of that clearance is unrecorded, but the gap between the mid-twentieth-century map and the late-twentieth-century survey is telling. Sometime in those intervening decades, a feature that had survived perhaps fifteen hundred years of Irish history was removed from the landscape, most likely in the course of agricultural improvement within the demesne grounds.

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