Enclosure, Ballymore, Co. Galway

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballymore, Co. Galway

The Ordnance Survey got it wrong, or at least incomplete.

The nineteenth-century six-inch maps record a small circular enclosure at Ballymore in County Galway, roughly eleven metres across, the kind of modest ring-fort trace that appears in hundreds of Irish fields. On the ground, however, what survives is rectangular, measuring approximately twelve metres on its northeast to southwest axis and just over eleven metres on the perpendicular, making it a noticeably different shape to what the cartographers noted.

The structure sits on a low hummock rising out of level pastureland, a slight elevation that would have given any original occupants a modest but useful vantage over the surrounding ground. It is defined by a collapsed bank of earth and stone, wide at its base, roughly 7.8 metres across, though the upstanding portion has slumped considerably over time. Stone-facing, the kind of deliberate coursing that would once have given the bank a cleaner, more defensible edge, is still visible in places both on the inner and outer sides of the bank. A gap of about 2.5 metres on the southeast side may represent the original entrance, the standard placement for enclosures of this type in Ireland, which were often orientated to catch morning light or to face away from prevailing weather. Trees have been planted along the bank at some point, which is a common occurrence with old earthworks in Ireland; farmers frequently used such raised features as convenient boundaries or as sheltered planting ground, inadvertently helping to preserve the underlying structure even as the planting complicates any reading of the original form.

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