Enclosure, Kilmore, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Kilmore, Co. Galway

On a south-facing slope in north Galway, where undulating grassland gives way to bogland below, there is an enclosure that has almost completely ceased to exist.

What survives is little more than a scarp, a low earthen edge curving from east-south-east around through south to north-west, tracing an arc roughly thirty-six metres across. The north-eastern portion has vanished entirely, leaving the monument open and incomplete. Later field walls have cut across it at multiple points, compounding the damage. It is the kind of site that rewards only the most patient observer.

Enclosures of this type are among the most common, and most ambiguous, of Irish field monuments. They may have served as settlements, as enclosures for livestock, or as boundaries around structures long since gone. What makes this particular example quietly interesting is what lies within its interior: a cashel-based enclosure of the same broad class, recorded separately in the county inventory compiled by Olive Alcock, Kathy de hÓra, and Paul Gosling, published in 1999. A cashel, in this context, refers to a stone-walled enclosure, typically of early medieval date. The presence of one enclosure nested inside another suggests a site that was used, adapted, or reused across time, even if the precise sequence of that activity is now impossible to read from the surface alone.

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Pete F
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