Enclosure, Ballyglass, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
In a field of grassland near the townland boundary at Ballyglass in County Galway, the land holds the faint outline of something old and not immediately legible.
What survives is a subcircular enclosure, roughly 36 metres east to west and 28 metres north to south, its shape just discernible through a degraded earthen bank that has slumped considerably over time. On the eastern, southern, and south-south-western sides, a shallow flat-bottomed fosse remains, a fosse being a ditch typically dug alongside an earthen bank to reinforce a boundary or defensive perimeter. A field boundary extends outward from the bank to the north-north-west, suggesting that later agricultural organisation has grown around the older structure, perhaps even borrowed from it.
Enclosures of this general type, defined by an earthen bank and fosse, are among the more common but still poorly understood features of the Irish archaeological landscape. They could have served as farmsteads, assembly places, or enclosures for livestock, and their dating without excavation remains difficult. What is clear in this case is that the monument has suffered considerably, its bank degraded to the point where it reads more as a slight rise in the ground than a deliberate construction. The surrounding grassland, and its position near a townland boundary, are details that often characterise such sites: marginal land, edges of things, places that escaped the plough only because they were inconvenient rather than respected.