Enclosure, Ballynagittagh, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
What draws attention to this site in the undulating grassland of north Galway is not what survives but what departs from it.
Leading away from the monument's north-western edge is a raised trackway, roughly eighteen and a half metres long and nearly five metres wide, built up about sixty centimetres above the surrounding ground on two parallel lines of stone. Whoever used this enclosure also needed a defined, slightly elevated route away from it, which is the kind of detail that turns a faint earthwork into something worth puzzling over.
The enclosure itself is roughly circular, around twenty-nine metres in diameter, and sits on a gentle rise. It was once defined by a bank of earth and stone, but that bank now survives only along the arc running from the south-east, around through the west, to the north-west. A later field wall cuts across the monument at both the north and south-east, and to the east of that wall only the faintest trace of the original enclosing element remains visible. The interior is flat and featureless, and sits slightly lower than the ground outside, which is a common characteristic of early enclosures, sometimes interpreted as the result of the bank material being scraped inward during original construction. Without excavation it is impossible to say whether this was a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead used widely in early medieval Ireland, or something older or different in function entirely. The raised trackway complicates any simple reading; such features are not commonly recorded in association with enclosures of this kind, and its purpose remains open.