Enclosure, Barnavihall, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Barnavihall, Co. Galway

Two conjoined enclosures once occupied a patch of gently rolling farmland in north Galway, yet today there is nothing whatsoever to see.

No earthwork, no shadow in the grass, no crop mark visible to a passing walker. The site exists now almost entirely as a cartographic memory, recorded on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map published in 1933, and that map remains the primary evidence that anything was ever there at all.

What the 1933 survey captured were two enclosures sitting side by side roughly 200 metres west of Barnavihall House. The north-western one was circular, approximately 25 metres in diameter. Its south-eastern companion was larger and oval in plan, measuring around 30 metres on its north-east to south-west axis and about 20 metres across. Enclosures of this kind are a familiar feature of the Irish archaeological landscape; they range widely in date and function, from early medieval ringforts used as farmsteads to prehistoric burial or ceremonial sites. The pairing here, two differently shaped enclosures set immediately adjacent to one another, is a slightly unusual arrangement, though without excavation or further survey it is impossible to say what either structure was for, or when it was built. No visible surface trace survives, which suggests that decades of agricultural activity have levelled whatever banks or ditches originally defined them.

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