Enclosure, Bullaun, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Bullaun, Co. Galway

The best clue that something once stood at Bullaun is a gentle curve in the ground, a scarp tracing an arc across a north-west-facing slope in County Galway.

The enclosure it describes is largely gone, absorbed into the working landscape over generations, but its outline survives just enough to be read, if you know what you are looking at.

The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced in the nineteenth century, recorded the site as a circular enclosure roughly 48 metres in diameter. Enclosures of this kind are among the most common yet most variable monuments in the Irish countryside; they may represent the remains of a ringfort, a type of early medieval farmstead typically defined by an earthen bank and ditch, or they may have earlier or later origins entirely. At Bullaun, two modern field walls have since been built across the site, one running north-east to south-west and a second branching off perpendicularly toward the south-east. Where these walls cut through the monument, the original earthwork has been levelled. Only between them does the curving scarp remain, marking the north-eastern to south-eastern arc of what was once a complete circle. It is a common story in Irish field archaeology: a monument that reads clearly on an old map has been quietly dismantled by the ordinary business of farming, leaving only a fragment to suggest the original form.

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