Enclosure, Blindwell, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
On the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, a neat circle is drawn in the undulating grassland near Blindwell in north County Galway.
On the ground, that circle has almost entirely disappeared. What remains is a single arc of an earthen and stone bank, curving from the south-west to the north-west, with a boreen running along its outer edge. Everywhere else, the surface is unbroken grass.
The site is a circular enclosure, roughly twenty-five metres in diameter. Enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, typically interpreted as the remains of a ringfort, the enclosed farmstead of an early medieval landowner or farmer, though without excavation it is impossible to say more with confidence about this particular example. What the Blindwell site illustrates, quietly and without drama, is how thoroughly the landscape can absorb such structures. The boreen that skirts the surviving bank may itself follow the line of the original boundary, the road having settled into the space the enclosure once defined, which would help explain why this fragment survived while the rest did not.