Enclosure, Baunmore, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
On a hilltop in the rolling farmland of north Galway, there is an ancient enclosure that exists, in practical terms, only as a photograph.
No bank, no ditch, no scatter of stone marks the ground today. The entire evidence for this structure amounts to a circular cropmark roughly 150 metres across, captured during aerial reconnaissance in July 1967.
Cropmarks appear when buried features, such as the filled-in ditches of old enclosures, affect how crops grow above them. Soil that was once disturbed tends to retain more moisture, producing slightly lusher, taller growth in lines or curves that become legible from the air even when nothing is visible at ground level. The flight that caught this one was logged as CUCAP ATF 12, part of the Cambridge University Committee for Aerial Photography programme, which during the mid-twentieth century systematically documented archaeological sites across Britain and Ireland that surface survey alone would never have found. The diameter of approximately 150 metres puts this firmly in the larger category of circular enclosures, suggesting something of considerable significance once occupied this rise, whether a substantial ringfort, a ceremonial site, or an enclosure of another kind entirely. The hilltop position is consistent with sites that were built to be seen, or to see from, though the precise nature and date of this one remain unknown.