Enclosure, Keernaun, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Keernaun, Co. Galway

In the low-lying grassland of Keernaun in north County Galway, there is a site that exists more as a cartographic memory than a physical one.

A circular enclosure roughly 32 metres in diameter was recorded on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map in 1920, but today no visible surface trace survives. The ground shows nothing. What once warranted marking on a map has since been absorbed entirely into the field.

Circular enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, typically interpreted as the remains of ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads that housed rural families across the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1200 AD. They were usually defined by an earthen bank and ditch, and their disappearance from the landscape is rarely dramatic; centuries of ploughing, drainage work, and agricultural improvement are usually sufficient to flatten even substantial earthworks. Associated with this site is a record classed as a CBG, a term referring to a cash book or field record used during earlier archaeological surveys, suggesting the site was noted in some form of earlier documentation before its surface features were lost entirely. Whether that record captures anything beyond what the 1920 map already shows is not clear from what survives.

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