Enclosure, Ballygarraun, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballygarraun, Co. Galway

In a field in Ballygarraun, County Galway, a low earthen platform sits in gently undulating pastureland, carrying the remains of a rectangular enclosure that nobody has quite been able to place.

The enclosure itself measures roughly 28 metres north to south and 21 metres east to west, set atop a larger platform of around 42 by 35 metres, and the whole arrangement is solid enough to record but ambiguous enough to resist easy classification. It might be a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval farmstead in Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks. It might instead be a moated site, a form of enclosed settlement more common from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, usually associated with Anglo-Norman or later medieval occupation. Or it might be something else entirely, a later settlement feature that has borrowed the ground from an earlier one.

The scholarly uncertainty here is itself telling. Cody, writing in 1989, noted traces of a later field wall along most of the eastern side of the platform, with intermittent heaps of stone suggesting that a wall once ran around the whole perimeter. That stonework points to at least one phase of activity after the original enclosure was constructed, though whether that later use followed by decades or centuries is impossible to say without excavation. The site was also recorded by Knox as far back as 1918, so it has attracted attention for over a hundred years without yielding a firm answer. Adding to the interest is a ringfort that sits approximately 100 metres to the north-west, raising the possibility that this stretch of Galway farmland once supported more than one phase or form of enclosed settlement, each leaving its own quiet mark on the ground.

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Pete F
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