Enclosure, Eochaill, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
In the townland of Baile na mBocht on Inis Mór, the largest of the Aran Islands, there is a place where a stone fort once stood and now almost nothing does.
What remains is a faintly raised patch of ground, roughly D-shaped, measuring about 14 metres north to south and 13 metres east to west. Without prior knowledge, a visitor would likely walk straight across it.
When the geologist G. H. Kinahan recorded the site in 1869, there was still something worth describing. He noted a small stone fort around 21 metres in diameter, enclosed by a wall approximately 2.4 metres thick, with a flagged rectangular doorway less than a metre high and just over a metre wide, oriented to the south-east. An enclosure of this type, a roughly circular or oval area defined by a substantial drystone wall, is a form found widely across early medieval Ireland, used variously for settlement, livestock, or as a defended farmstead. By the time Tim Robinson surveyed the area in 1980, the wall had gone entirely, leaving only the slight elevation in the ground to suggest what had been there. The doorway Kinahan measured with such precision, with its low lintel and flagged threshold, exists now only in his notes.