Enclosure, Cartrondoogan, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
In the wet pastureland of Cartrondoogan in north Galway, a slight rise in the ground marks what was once a pair of conjoined enclosures.
What makes this site quietly odd is not what remains, but what has been selectively forgotten. Early Ordnance Survey mapping, produced in the nineteenth century, recorded two circular enclosures sitting side by side along an east-west axis. By the time the third edition was published in 1933, only one of the two had been deemed worth marking. The eastern enclosure had, cartographically speaking, ceased to exist.
The western enclosure, the larger of the two, measures roughly 34 metres in diameter. It is defined partly by a degraded earthen bank on its south-eastern side, and elsewhere by a scarp, meaning a natural or man-made slope where the ground drops away to signal a boundary. Neither feature is especially dramatic, which is perhaps why the site sits so lightly in the record. The smaller eastern enclosure, at about 25.8 metres across, survives only as a slightly raised circular platform in the grass. These kinds of earthwork enclosures, broadly similar in form to the ringforts found across Ireland, were typically used for settlement or agricultural purposes in the early medieval period, though without excavation it is difficult to say more about what activity took place here. The natural rise on which both enclosures sit would have offered a modest but useful vantage point above the surrounding wet ground, which remains pastureland to this day.