Enclosure, Clooncannon, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
On the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of County Galway, a small circle is marked in the landscape near Clooncannon, annotated as a circular tree-planted enclosure.
On the ground today, the reality is considerably more modest. What remains is a subcircular earthwork, roughly 26 metres across its longest axis, most of which has been absorbed into an ordinary modern field boundary. A curving bank survives along the southern to north-western arc, reaching a maximum height of just 1.35 metres and a width of about 2.2 metres; elsewhere the enclosure is traceable only as a low scarp barely ten centimetres above the surrounding ground. The interior has been cleared entirely.
The enclosure sits on a low ridge in what was once demesne land, the managed estate grounds attached to Runnamead House, a nineteenth-century mansion whose site lies roughly 200 metres to the east-south-east. Demesne landscapes frequently incorporated older earthworks, sometimes preserving them within ornamental planting schemes, which may explain why the OS surveyors recorded a ring of trees here at all. Whether the enclosure itself predates the mansion's estate by centuries, or was in some way shaped by it, is not clear from what survives. A separate earthwork was recorded approximately 100 metres to the west-south-west, suggesting this low ridge held more than one feature of archaeological interest, even if both are now difficult to read in the field.