Enclosure, Creagh, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
On the flat farmland at the north-eastern edge of Ballinasloe, there is a site that has, in the most literal sense, ceased to exist above ground.
No bank, no ditch, no earthwork of any kind remains visible. What survives is purely cartographic: a C-shaped enclosure, roughly 95 metres along its north-west to south-east axis, recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map and labelled with the quietly elegiac phrase "Fort (Remains of)" on the larger 1:2500 plan surveyed between 1912 and 1916. By the time surveyors were measuring it on paper, it was already a ruin. Now it is not even that.
Enclosures of this kind, usually circular or roughly oval earthen banks sometimes accompanied by an external ditch, were among the most common settlement forms in early medieval Ireland, serving as farmsteads, cattle enclosures, or defended residences depending on their size and construction. The C-shape recorded here suggests the enclosure was already partially lost to agriculture or erosion by the time it was first mapped in the nineteenth century. The Ordnance Survey's decision to name it a fort, a common shorthand applied to earthwork enclosures throughout Ireland, tells us little about its original function but a good deal about how such sites were understood at the time. Whatever community or household once occupied this patch of east Galway ground, their physical mark on the landscape has been entirely absorbed by the fields around it.