Enclosure, Tawin, Co. Galway

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Tawin, Co. Galway

On Tawin Island, a small tidal island in Galway Bay, there is a feature that was not recorded at all until an aircraft passed over it in the summer of 1999.

Even then, what it actually is remains an open question. The roughly subrectangular patch of ground, measuring about ten metres across its longer axis and eight metres on the shorter, sits on a gentle rise in low-lying commonage. It could be a deliberate enclosure of some antiquity, or it could simply be a natural hummock that farmers at some point chose to incorporate into their field system. That ambiguity is part of what makes it worth noting.

The feature was identified during aerial reconnaissance carried out by Markus Casey in August 1999. Seen from the air, the outline becomes legible in a way it apparently does not from the ground: a low bank, roughly 5.5 metres wide, running along the south-west and north-west sides, with an internal height of only fifteen centimetres and an external height of just under a metre. To the north-west and north-east there is a gentle scarp, about 3.5 metres wide and thirty centimetres high. Radiating outward from the feature at the north-west and north-east are field walls belonging to a broader field system on the island, which suggests that whatever this rise is, it became a focal point around which later agricultural boundaries were organised. Whether the enclosure bank is genuinely early or simply a tidying-up of a natural landform by relatively recent farming activity, the record does not say with certainty.

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