Enclosure, Clogh, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
On a low rise in the rolling farmland of north Galway, there is an enclosure that is easier to describe by what is missing than by what remains.
The western half has been quarried away entirely, and what survives is a kidney-shaped outline, running roughly fifty-two metres east to west and just under twenty-four metres north to south, defined in part by an earthen bank along the northern and north-eastern arc, and in part by a scarp, a cut or slope in the ground surface, from east to south. Slight traces of the vanished bank are still legible on the western side if you know where to look, but the overall impression is of a form that has been interrupted mid-sentence.
Enclosures of this kind are common across Ireland, though their purposes varied considerably, from settlement to ritual to agricultural use, and dating them without excavation is rarely straightforward. What makes this particular site a little more interesting is a strand of local tradition that speaks of a cave somewhere within its interior. The most likely candidate for such a feature would be a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber that appears frequently in early medieval Irish sites, typically associated with settlement enclosures and thought to have served for storage, refuge, or both. No surface trace of any such structure has been identified here, which means it either no longer exists, was sealed when the quarrying altered the ground, or remains genuinely hidden beneath the soil. Local memory has kept the idea alive without the archaeology yet confirming it.