Enclosure, Cahernamuck, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
Some monuments announce themselves; this one had to be found from space.
A roughly subrectangular enclosure sitting in pastureland near Cahernamuck in County Galway, measuring approximately 41 metres northwest to southeast and 40 metres northeast to southwest, went unrecorded until a researcher named Jean-Charles Caillère spotted it in Google Earth satellite imagery from March 2011. That a feature of this scale, broadly the footprint of a large farmyard, could remain outside the archaeological record into the twenty-first century says something about how much of the Irish landscape is still being pieced together.
The enclosure belongs to a cluster of related monuments in the same stretch of countryside. A cashel, which is a stone-walled enclosure typically associated with early medieval settlement and farming, lies roughly 255 metres to the southeast, and a second enclosure sits around 530 metres to the northeast. Whether the Cahernamuck enclosure shares a period or a purpose with either of those neighbours is not known, and the physical evidence for working that out is now limited. A field boundary cuts across the enclosing element from the northwest to the north-northeast, and later aerial imagery indicates that the monument has been largely levelled. What Caillère identified in 2011 may already have been a faint trace; what survives on the ground today is likely fainter still.