Enclosure, Ballynagittagh, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballynagittagh, Co. Galway

In a gently sloping field in north County Galway, the ground holds the ghost of a structure that most people would walk straight past.

What survives at Ballynagittagh is a subcircular enclosure, roughly 27 by 26 metres, its outline now little more than a collapsed drystone wall reduced to its foundations. Along part of its circuit, from the east round to the south, even those foundations give way to a series of low mounds, the last legible traces of whatever originally closed the space. The southwestern arc, from south to south-southwest, is the best preserved stretch, where the wall footing still reads clearly as something deliberate and human-made.

Enclosures of this kind are scattered widely across the Irish landscape and are generally understood as the remains of early medieval farmsteads, the type sometimes called a ringfort or rath, though that terminology covers a broad range of forms and functions. A drystone wall construction, built without mortar, places this example within a tradition common in the more rocky parts of Connacht. The wall itself, where it survives, measures just under a metre in width. Later field walls have been built up against the monument at three points, northwest, north-northeast, and south, a reminder that the land was continuously worked long after the enclosure fell out of use. To the southwest, a further detail lingers in the turf: a series of low, grass-covered stony banks spreading across an area of roughly one hundred square metres, forming what appear to be small rectangular and irregular field plots. These may be connected to the enclosure, traces of the agricultural landscape that once surrounded it, though the relationship is not certain.

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