Enclosure, Hillswood, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Hillswood, Co. Galway

On a small hillock rising from low-lying grassland in County Galway, a ring of trees marks a site that is simultaneously two things at once: a modern drystone enclosure, and something considerably older hiding beneath it.

The Ordnance Survey six-inch maps recorded it as a tree-planted enclosure, which suggests it had already taken on its present character by the nineteenth century, but the trees and the tidy wall they surround appear to mask an earlier structure whose origins are less easy to read.

What survives is a subcircular enclosure measuring roughly 43.5 metres east to west and 40.5 metres north to south, its perimeter defined by a modern drystone wall. Poorly preserved as the site is, there are clues that something older underlies it. A spread of stone running from the south-west around to the north hints at an earlier wall beneath or behind the visible one, and at the western side the footings of that original wall, about 1.6 metres wide, are still traceable at ground level. Enclosures of this general type, roughly circular or subcircular and set on slightly elevated ground, are a common feature of the Irish archaeological landscape; they served various purposes across different periods, from early medieval settlement to stock management, and without excavation it is rarely possible to say with confidence which era this one belongs to. The later wall and planting have preserved the form of the site while simultaneously complicating any reading of it.

The trees that fill the interior are still standing, giving the hillock a deliberately enclosed, almost secretive appearance from a distance, the kind of feature that reads clearly on a map but rewards a closer look on the ground, particularly at the western edge where the older stonework becomes visible.

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