Enclosure, Cahermore, Co. Galway

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Cahermore, Co. Galway

Just to the south-west of a cashel near Cahermore in County Galway, there is a roughly D-shaped enclosure that raises more questions than it answers.

Measuring approximately 57 metres east to west and 54 metres north to south, it is defined by two earth and stone banks with a fosse, or ditch, running between them. A causewayed entrance gap, a deliberate break in the bank with ground level enough to cross, opens at the south. Along the northern side, however, the outer bank and fosse have either eroded away or were never completed, leaving that section of the boundary unresolved.

The enclosure sits in close proximity to a cashel, a type of stone-walled ringfort typically used in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead enclosure, sometimes with associated outbuildings or animal pens. Whether this D-shaped feature served as an annexe to that cashel, a separately constructed enclosure of a different period, or something else entirely is genuinely uncertain. A large rubbish dump at the north-east of the site obscures part of the monument and, critically, the exact physical relationship between the two structures. Without being able to trace where one ends and the other begins, any interpretation of how they functioned together remains speculative. It is an unresolved pairing, sitting quietly in the landscape with the more prominent cashel nearby, the smaller enclosure's purpose still buried under accumulated debris.

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Pete F
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