Enclosure, Kilgarve, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
On the eastern fringe of Ballinasloe, where the land rolls unevenly into ordinary farmland, a roughly circular earthwork sits in a condition that might best be described as quietly surviving.
It is not dramatic from a distance. What marks it out is its scale and its persistence: a subcircular enclosure measuring approximately 80.5 metres east-northeast to west-southwest and 78.3 metres south-southeast to north-northwest, still legible after centuries of agricultural pressure, partial quarrying, and the slow encroachment of field boundaries.
Enclosures of this kind, sometimes called ringforts or raths, were among the most common settlement forms in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as enclosed farmsteads for a single family or small community. The defining elements here are a degraded earthen bank or scarp and a wide external fosse, the fosse being a ditch dug around the outside of the bank to reinforce the boundary. The bank is most visible along the northern arc, from west-northwest through to east-southeast. Along the southern portion, a straight modern field boundary appears to follow the line of the enclosure's inner face, suggesting that later farmers recognised a useful edge and built upon it without necessarily understanding, or caring about, what it originally was. A quarry pit has been cut at the south-southwest, and a cattle shed sits just outside it. These are the ordinary indignities of continued land use. One breach in the bank, at the north-northeast, is roughly seven metres wide and has a corresponding causeway crossing the fosse; this alignment is thought to mark the original entrance into the enclosure. Some bedrock outcrops in the interior, which may have influenced where the enclosure was sited or what activities could take place within it.