Enclosure, Beagh, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Beagh, Co. Galway

Near the summit of a low ridge in the undulating grassland of Beagh, Co. Galway, there is an enclosure that has done its best to disappear.

Most of it has. What was once a roughly circular enclosure, measuring around fifty metres from north to south, now survives only in fragments: a stretch of earthen bank running from the south-east around through the south and south-west, and then a tree-lined scarp that takes over as the enclosing element from the south-west around through the west and north. Elsewhere, there is nothing visible at ground level. Field walls, built at some later point without apparent concern for what lay beneath, cut straight through the monument at the north and south-east, compounding the erasure.

Two small rectangular structures, built of earth and stone, survive where the bank itself survives. One, on the south-south-west side, measures roughly eight metres by four and a half; the other, slightly smaller at five metres by four, sits just to the south-south-east. Both abut the inner face of the bank, which suggests they were built in deliberate relationship to it, perhaps as shelters, stores, or subsidiary living spaces within a larger enclosed settlement. Enclosures of this broadly circular type are closely related to ringforts, the earthen or stone-walled farmsteads that served as the basic unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The connection to that tradition is reinforced by the fact that a ringfort sits just one hundred and seventy metres to the west-north-west, suggesting this part of the ridge once carried a small cluster of related activity rather than a single isolated site.

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Pete F
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