Enclosure, Killadullisk, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
There is a particular kind of archaeological site that survives only on paper, its physical form long since erased by the slow work of farming and time.
At Killadullisk in County Galway, a circular enclosure roughly twenty metres in diameter was recorded on the 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the first systematic cartographic surveys of the Irish countryside, and today that map entry is essentially all that remains. No earthwork, no ring of stones, no depression in the turf offers itself to the eye. The site sits in undulating grassland, unremarkable to anyone who does not know to look.
Enclosures of this kind, often referred to as ringforts or raths depending on their construction, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically used as defended farmsteads between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. A diameter of around twenty metres would place this one at the smaller end of the scale. By the time the Ordnance Survey cartographers passed through in the 1830s it was already reduced enough to warrant only a plan outline, and at some point after that a field boundary running roughly north-north-east to south-south-west was laid across the site, cutting through what would have been its interior. That boundary, and the agricultural activity that accompanied it, accounts for why nothing visible now survives at ground level.