Enclosure, Annaghkeen, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
On a low ridge in Annaghkeen, a roughly circular enclosure sits in quiet ambiguity, its drystone wall tracing an outline that has puzzled those who have looked closely at it.
The wall is built in short, straight sections rather than following the smooth curve you would expect of a cashel, the term for a stone-walled ringfort of early medieval origin, and this makes it something of an oddity. The interior sits slightly lower than the surrounding ground, and a well-preserved entrance opens to the west. The structure measures approximately 25 metres east to west and just over 22 metres north to south, small enough to walk around in a minute or two, yet large enough to have registered on the very first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it appeared as a hachured enclosure, the cartographic shorthand for an earthen bank or raised boundary.
By the time the third edition of that map was published in 1922, the site had been recorded simply as a roughly circular field, which hints at what likely happened here. The current drystone wall is probably a later agricultural construction, built on top of or in place of an earlier earthwork. The original enclosure beneath may be considerably older, though its date and precise function remain uncertain. Forty metres to the southwest lies a cairn, a mound of heaped stones that in Irish contexts often marks a prehistoric burial, and the proximity of the two features on the same ridge suggests this corner of north Galway held some significance in the landscape long before anyone drew a map of it.