Enclosure, Gortronnagh, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Gortronnagh, Co. Galway

In the bogland of Gortronnagh in north County Galway, a hillock rises just prominently enough to have caught someone's attention, at some point, long ago.

That attention resulted in an enclosure, roughly circular and approximately fifty metres across, the kind of earthwork that once served any number of purposes in early Irish life: a ringfort for a farming family, a cattle enclosure, a defended homestead. Whatever its original function, the site now offers nothing visible to the eye. The hillock is entirely overgrown, and no archaeological features break the surface.

What keeps this place on the record at all is a single notation on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the remarkable mid-nineteenth century cartographic project that documented Ireland's landscape in extraordinary detail at a time when many ancient earthworks were still legible on the ground. The surveyors saw a circular enclosure here and drew it. That drawing is now the primary evidence that anything deliberate once occupied this rise above the bog. Whether the feature had already begun to fade when they visited, or whether it has since been absorbed entirely by vegetation and peat, is not recorded.

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Pete F
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