Enclosure, Ahascragh, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
On a gentle east-facing slope near Ahascragh in County Galway, there is almost nothing left to see, and that near-absence is precisely what makes this site worth pausing over.
A circular enclosure once stood here, roughly thirty-five metres across according to the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which recorded it clearly enough that surveyors considered it worth marking. What remains today is a rise in the ground of about fifteen centimetres, curving from the south-west through west to north, the ghost of a roughly circular platform approximately thirty-two metres in diameter. The land has essentially swallowed it.
Circular enclosures of this kind are among the more common, if often misunderstood, features of the Irish landscape. They typically served as enclosed farmsteads or settlement sites, and while the word "ringfort" is often used loosely, such earthworks range in date broadly across the early medieval period. This particular example sits some 120 metres south-west of a separate earthwork, suggesting the area carried sustained human activity across time. The first Ordnance Survey mapping of Ireland, carried out in the nineteenth century, captured many such features at a moment before agricultural improvement and land clearance had reduced them further, making those early maps an invaluable record of what was once visible on the ground.