Enclosure, Knockroe, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
There is almost nothing to see at Knockroe in County Galway, and that absence is itself the point.
Where an enclosure once stood, roughly forty metres north to south and thirty-five east to west, there is now only a faint rise in the ground, the kind of subtle swell that most people would walk across without a second thought.
The enclosure was recorded on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1946, which captured its subcircular outline before the land was altered. Enclosures of this type are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish landscape; they are generally understood to be the remains of enclosed settlements, farmsteads, or occasionally ceremonial spaces, defined by an earthen bank and sometimes an outer ditch. This one sat approximately twenty metres south-west of a second enclosure, suggesting the two may have functioned in proximity to one another. Sometime during the 1960s, however, the site was levelled as part of a land reclamation scheme. Such schemes were widespread in rural Ireland during that decade, as farmers sought to bring marginal or uneven ground into productive agricultural use. The map record and local memory are now the only substantive evidence that the feature ever existed.