Enclosure, Ballinlass, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
On the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, this site appears as a tidy circle of trees in the grassland of a country estate, its perimeter planted deliberately, as though someone wished to mark or contain something on the ground.
Whatever that intention was, it has not survived clearly enough to explain itself. What remains today is a circular earthen platform roughly 39 metres across, its edge defined by a low, eroded scarp that rises no more than half a metre at its best-preserved points. On the western side, even that much has been obscured by a later field boundary cutting across the line of the enclosure entirely.
The site sits within the former demesne of Ballinlass House, in County Galway, with Ballinlass Lough lying to the west. An enclosure of this kind, a raised or defined circular area set within a landscape, could represent any number of things depending on its date and origin: a ringfort, which was a farmstead type common across early medieval Ireland; a later feature associated with the estate itself; or something older still. The notes do not resolve this, and the physical remains are too degraded to be read easily. What the first Ordnance Survey map does confirm is that the circle of trees was deliberate and visible in the nineteenth century, suggesting the enclosure had enough presence at that point to be considered worth marking, perhaps even worth preserving in a decorative sense within the demesne landscape.