Enclosure, Caherateemore, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
In the grassland of north County Galway, a low ring of earth and stone traces a shape in the ground that most people walking past would dismiss as a natural quirk of the land.
The enclosure at Caherateemore is roughly subcircular, measuring about 41 metres from east-south-east to west-north-west and 39 metres across the other axis, which places it within the broad family of ringforts, the enclosed farmstead settlements that once dotted the Irish countryside in their tens of thousands, mostly dating from the early medieval period. What makes this one quietly interesting is not its size or condition but the layering of evidence still faintly readable on the ground.
The site sits on a gentle south-east-facing slope, a positioning typical of ringfort builders who favoured slopes that offered drainage and a degree of natural shelter. The enclosure is defined by a bank of earth and stone, though it is poorly preserved. More telling is what can still be traced on the south-east through west to north arc of the site: the remnants of both an intervening fosse, a defensive ditch running between the inner bank and a further outer bank, and that outer bank itself. A fosse-and-outer-bank arrangement suggests this was once a multivallate enclosure, meaning it had more than one defensive or boundary circuit, a feature sometimes associated with higher-status settlement. The outer bank has been largely obscured by a later field wall, the kind of agricultural overwriting that happened across Ireland as land was divided and redivided in post-medieval centuries, quietly burying earlier boundaries beneath newer ones.