Enclosure, Ballymore, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballymore, Co. Galway

In the farmland of Ballymore in County Galway, a substantial rectangular stone enclosure once stood, along with three house sites, an internal dividing wall, a crescent-shaped wall curving off its northern end, and two further enclosures clustered nearby.

Today, none of it can be seen. The surface has been absorbed back into the working landscape, leaving no visible trace of what was once a complex and apparently well-organised settlement cluster.

When McCaffrey catalogued the site in 1952, the main enclosure measured roughly 38.4 metres north to south and 36.9 metres east to west, defined by a drystone wall approximately 2.7 metres wide. Drystone construction, which uses no mortar and relies entirely on the careful fitting of stones, is a technique with deep roots in the Irish landscape, and here it was applied with some sophistication. The main enclosure wall was built with two stone faces set on edge, and the three internal house sites followed the same double-faced method. The two nearby enclosures, however, were built differently, their walls consisting of a single face of blocks set on edge, suggesting either a functional distinction or a separate phase of construction. A further wall ran outward from the western side of the monument in a north-westerly direction, and that crescent-shaped wall at the northern end adds an unusual, slightly irregular quality to what might otherwise seem a straightforward rectangular plan. McCaffrey classified it as a stone fort, a broad term applied in Irish archaeology to enclosed settlements defined by substantial stone walls rather than earthen banks.

What is striking about this site is the contrast between the detail of that mid-twentieth-century record and the complete absence of anything to see on the ground today. The features McCaffrey described were evidently visible, at least in outline, in 1952, but subsequent agricultural activity has since erased whatever remained. The site exists now only in the documentary record, a reasonably well-described place that has quietly ceased to be a place at all.

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