Enclosure, Kilcoona, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Kilcoona, Co. Galway

In the level grassland of Kilcoona in County Galway, there is an archaeological site that no longer exists in any form you can see.

A circular enclosure roughly sixty metres across was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, showing a feature that would once have defined a significant presence in the landscape, but today there is no visible surface trace of it whatsoever. The field has swallowed it entirely.

Circular enclosures of this kind are among the most common early medieval monument types in Ireland, typically interpreted as the enclosed farmsteads of free farming families, defined by an earthen bank and internal ditch. At sixty metres in diameter, this example would have sat comfortably within the middle range of such sites. The OS six-inch maps, surveyed in the nineteenth century, were meticulous enough to capture its outline at that point, and the record shows the enclosure was already being cut by a field wall at its north-west and south-east edges, suggesting that agricultural reorganisation was already eroding its form even then. By the time any formal archaeological record was made, drawing on the published inventory of North Galway compiled by Olive Alcock, Kathy de hÓra, and Paul Gosling and issued in 1999, the monument had ceased to register above ground at all.

There is nothing for a visitor to see here, and that is precisely what makes the place worth thinking about. The field boundary that sliced through it is likely still there, indifferent to what it interrupted. The enclosure survives only as a cartographic ghost, a circle on an old map that the working landscape gradually erased.

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Pete F
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