Enclosure, Ardagh, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ardagh, Co. Galway

On a north-facing slope in the pastureland of Ardagh, County Galway, there is a subtle depression in the ground that has puzzled those who have looked at it closely enough to wonder what it once was.

The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it as an oval enclosure measuring roughly 40 metres by 30 metres, a clear and deliberate shape. What survives today is considerably less defined: a flat, subcircular area approximately 37 metres across, its outline traced by a shallow fosse, a ditch cut into the earth, running from the south-east around through the south to the north-north-west. The fosse is around five metres wide where it can still be made out, which is just enough to suggest that something here was once enclosed with purpose.

The uncertainty about what that purpose was is part of what makes this site quietly interesting. It may be a barrow, which would make it a prehistoric burial mound, the enclosing earthwork marking a grave or a monument to the dead. Alternatively, it could be a ringfort, the circular or oval enclosures that were used as defended farmsteads and domestic settlements throughout early medieval Ireland, typically between the sixth and twelfth centuries. The two types can be difficult to distinguish when a site has weathered down to little more than a shallow fosse and a levelled interior. Without excavation, the question simply stays open. What the old map confirms is that the enclosure was more legible in the nineteenth century than it is now, which means the intervening years of agricultural use have continued to soften its edges, gradually returning it to the ordinary appearance of the field around it.

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