Enclosure, Ballybaun, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballybaun, Co. Galway

In a level Galway field, a low bank of earth and stone traces out a roughly rectangular shape, about forty metres by thirty-one, that most passing walkers would take for a natural rise in the ground.

Hawthorn has claimed the eastern and western sides, and three gaps in the bank at the south-west, north-west, and north-east corners look recent enough to be the work of modern farm machinery rather than any historical event. What the place actually represents is an early enclosure, the kind of bounded space that once defined domestic or agricultural life in rural Ireland, its original purpose now sitting somewhere between the legible and the lost.

The structure is defined by a bank measuring roughly two metres wide and just over a metre high on the interior face, slightly more on the exterior, with traces of a shallow fosse, essentially a ditch, running along the south-east to south side. Along the inner faces of the east and south sides, large limestone boulders survive, and these may be the remnants of deliberate wall-facing, stone set against the earthen bank to reinforce or finish it. In the north-western corner of the interior, there are traces of what may be a house site, a ghostly outline suggesting that someone once lived within these boundaries. How old the enclosure is, and who built it, the surviving evidence does not say.

The site sits in ordinary farmland, with no obvious marker or infrastructure to single it out. The hawthorn growth along the banks makes the eastern and western sides easier to read from a distance than from up close, and the limestone boulders along the inner faces are best examined on the southern and eastern stretches, where the vegetation thins.

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Pete F
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