Enclosure, Cool, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Cool, Co. Galway

In the flat pastureland of Cool townland, close to its western boundary, the ground holds the faint memory of a circle.

What the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded as a circular enclosure roughly 35 metres in diameter has, over time, been reduced to something you could walk past without registering it at all: a short earthen bank about two metres long at the east-south-east, a degraded scarp running from the south-east around through west to north, and what may be the ghost of an external fosse, a defensive or boundary ditch, at the northern side. Several field walls have been built directly through the monument, parcelling it up and blurring what little coherent shape remains.

Enclosures of this type, typically circular earthworks defined by a bank and fosse, are among the more common but least understood features of the Irish landscape. Many are presumed to be early medieval in origin, functioning as enclosed farmsteads or ringforts, though without excavation it is rarely possible to say more than that. What is notable here is how thoroughly the site has been absorbed into the working agricultural landscape around it. The OS surveyors who mapped it in the nineteenth century could still discern a coherent circle; what exists today is a series of disconnected fragments, legible mainly as slight variations in the lie of the ground.

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