Enclosure, Lurgan More, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Lurgan More, Co. Galway

On a low rise in the grassland at Lurgan More, overlooking a stretch of bogland to the north, there is an enclosure that exists more convincingly on paper than it does on the ground.

The Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, those meticulous nineteenth-century documents that recorded the Irish landscape in extraordinary detail, marked a subrectangular enclosure here, roughly 60 metres on its longer axis and 45 metres across. It is the kind of feature that might once have defined a farmstead, a place of small-scale habitation or animal management, its boundaries formed from earthen banks or stone. When a field inspector visited in April 1984, however, there was nothing left to see. No bank, no hollow, no suggestion of what had been there.

What remains is almost a ghost of a ghost. Aerial imagery reveals faint traces of the outline, the kind of cropmark or soil variation that only becomes legible when viewed from above, where subtle differences in vegetation growth or ground colour give away the buried geometry of something older. Enclosures of this general type are common across the Irish midlands and west, often associated with early medieval settlement, though without excavation it is impossible to say when this one was built, who used it, or why it was eventually abandoned to the bog's slow edge. The land has simply moved on, leaving the maps as the most reliable witness.

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Pete F
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