Enclosure, Glennagarraun, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Glennagarraun, Co. Galway

On a ridge in the undulating grassland of Glennagarraun in north Galway, there is an enclosure that has very nearly ceased to exist.

Oval in plan, measuring roughly 26 metres north to south and just under 20 metres east to west, it survives now as little more than a scarp, a low earthen edge that runs from the south-west around through the west to the north. On the eastern side, the natural slope of the ridge may have served as the boundary itself, the ground doing the work that an earthwork would otherwise do. At the southern end, faint traces of an external fosse survive, a fosse being a ditch dug to reinforce and define the perimeter, and there is a possible causeway across it, suggesting a formal entrance once existed here. A field wall has since pushed in from the west, and collapsed stone at that point has buried whatever remains of the enclosing element beneath it.

Enclosures of this kind are broadly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, though without excavation it is difficult to say much with certainty about this one. What is notable is its relationship to a ringfort sitting just 80 metres to the south. A ringfort is a roughly circular enclosed settlement, typically dating from between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and the presence of one so close to this enclosure may indicate that the two features formed part of the same agricultural or residential complex, or that this area was occupied across successive periods. The proximity is suggestive even if nothing definitive can be drawn from it.

The monument is poorly preserved and offers little to the untrained eye. A collapsed field wall actively obscures the western side, and the eastern boundary was perhaps always more implied by topography than constructed. What survives is essentially a trace, legible mainly through the relationship between the ridge, the scarp, and that faint depression at the south. It is the kind of site that rewards patience and a good eye for ground-level changes in a landscape that appears, at first glance, entirely ordinary.

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Pete F
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