Enclosure, Ballycorban, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
There is an archaeological site at Ballycorban, County Galway, that exists now mainly as an absence.
On the north-facing slope of a small hillock in hilly pastureland, a shallow circular hollow, about fifteen metres across, is the only indication that anything was ever here at all. The earthwork that once defined this place has been erased so thoroughly that the hollow itself is almost the only argument for pausing.
Ordnance Survey mapping tells a quiet story of incremental disappearance. The six-inch OS map of 1920 records a small, roughly subcircular enclosure measuring approximately sixteen metres east to west and thirteen metres north to south. An enclosure of this kind, defined by a raised bank, would typically have served some combination of agricultural, settlement, or ritual purposes in earlier centuries, though the notes attached to this site do not specify its origins or date. By the time the larger-scale OS survey was carried out between 1912 and 1916, the interior had been planted with fir trees, suggesting the enclosure had already ceased to function as anything other than a convenient planting boundary. Then, around 1980, according to local information, the defining bank was levelled. What the maps had carefully recorded across decades was removed in a single act of land clearance, leaving only the faint depression in the ground that can be seen today.