Enclosure, An Más, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Enclosures

Enclosure, An Más, Co. Galway

Some archaeological sites announce themselves with tumbled walls and grassy banks.

This one offers nothing at all. Near An Más in north County Galway, a roughly circular enclosure some thirty metres in diameter was recorded on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map in 1934, but no visible surface trace survives today. The ground gives no indication that anything was ever there.

Circular enclosures of this kind are a familiar, if not always well-understood, feature of the Irish landscape. Many are the remains of ringforts, known in Irish as ráth or lios, which served as enclosed farmsteads during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They typically consisted of an earthen bank and ditch encircling a domestic space, and were once so numerous across Ireland that tens of thousands have been recorded. The example at An Más was noted as lying approximately twenty metres south-west of a second enclosure, suggesting the two features may have been related in some way, perhaps part of the same small farming complex. By the time the 1934 map was being drawn up, surveyors could still make out enough of the form to mark it down. At some point after that, it disappeared entirely, levelled by agriculture, erosion, or simple time.

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