Enclosure, An Cluain, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
There is nothing left to see at An Cluain, and that is precisely what makes it worth knowing about.
Somewhere beneath the low-lying farmland of this part of County Galway lies the ghost of a circular enclosure, roughly 36 metres across, that has since vanished so completely that no surface trace remains. The ground gives nothing away.
The enclosure appears on the 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the most systematic early attempts to document the Irish landscape, drawn up at a time when many earthworks that had survived centuries of agriculture were still intact enough to be recorded. By the time the 1921 edition was produced, something had changed: the interior of the enclosure was shown as planted with trees. That single detail suggests the site was still a legible feature of the land well into the twentieth century, even if its original function had long been forgotten. Circular enclosures of this kind are found across Ireland and generally date from the early medieval period, though some are earlier; they served as farmsteads, burial grounds, or places with ritual significance, and their circular form, defined by a bank and ditch, is the same basic shape as the more familiar ringfort. What purpose this particular example served is unknown. At some point after 1921, the trees went, the earthwork was levelled, and the field absorbed it.