Enclosure, Eochaill, Co. Galway

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Eochaill, Co. Galway

On Inis Mór, the largest of the Aran Islands, not everything ancient announces itself clearly.

About 200 metres south-east of the promontory fort known as Dún Beag lies a subcircular enclosure at Eochaill that has largely been swallowed by the landscape around it. Its defining boundary, a bank of stone running roughly 26.5 metres north to south and 24.5 metres east to west, survives only as an intermittent, grass-covered ridge. From the south-east around to the north-north-east, modern field walls have been laid directly over it, so that what was once a deliberately bounded space has been quietly absorbed into the working geometry of the island's famous limestone field system.

Within the enclosure, the more intriguing feature is a low, circular mound of stone about 7.4 metres in diameter, with a hollow at its centre. This is thought to be a collapsed clochan, a type of dry-stone beehive hut built without mortar, once common across the western seaboard of Ireland and particularly associated with early medieval monastic and farming settlements. When a clochan falls in on itself over centuries, what remains is essentially this: a ring of tumbled stone with a depression where the corbelled roof once met the interior floor. The enclosure itself belongs to a class of roughly circular or oval earthworks found across Ireland, sometimes associated with early settlement, sometimes with agriculture, and often difficult to date precisely without excavation.

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Pete F
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