Enclosure, Ballynahattina, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
What survives of this enclosure at Ballynahattina is, in a sense, a record of its own destruction.
Sitting on a gentle rise in north Galway, the site was once a circular earthwork roughly 35 metres across, the kind of enclosed settlement that appears across Ireland in the early medieval period, built to define a farmstead, mark a boundary, or assert ownership over a patch of land. Today, that circle is barely legible. A single arc of bank along the western edge, about four metres wide and standing just over two metres above the surrounding ground, is all that reads clearly in the landscape.
The 1932 third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it as a complete circular enclosure, which at least establishes that it was still recognisable as such within living memory. Since then, or perhaps before, the interior has been largely quarried away, suggesting the earthwork was treated as a convenient source of stone or material rather than a feature worth preserving. A rectangular hollow, twelve metres long and three metres wide, running north to south through the western sector, survives alongside the bank remnant; it may relate to the quarrying activity, though its precise origin is not recorded. The diameter suggested by the remaining arc, around 28 metres, is slightly smaller than the 35 metres noted on the map, which may reflect the degree of erosion or the difficulty of measuring from a fragment alone.