Enclosure, Killagh More, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
In the grassland of Killagh More in north County Galway, there is a place that exists almost entirely on paper.
An oval enclosure, roughly 35 metres along its northeast to southwest axis and about 20 metres across, was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, those meticulous Victorian-era surveys that captured the Irish landscape in extraordinary detail during the nineteenth century. Today, no visible trace of it survives at ground level. The grass grows over whatever was once there, and a person walking across the field would have no reason to pause.
Enclosures of this kind are among the most common and least understood features of the Irish archaeological landscape. They could represent the remains of a ringfort, a type of circular or oval earthwork farmstead that was built and occupied roughly between 500 and 1000 AD, or something older still. Without excavation, it is impossible to say what this particular example was, who built it, or when. What the old maps recorded was presumably an earthwork visible to surveyors at the time of their fieldwork, most likely in the mid-nineteenth century, but whatever banks or ditches once defined the site have since been levelled, absorbed into the surrounding farmland. The inventory compiled by Olive Alcock, Kathy de hÓra, and Paul Gosling, published in 1999, recorded its dimensions and noted its absence from the present-day surface, which is itself a kind of documentation: a feature reduced to a cartographic memory.