Enclosure, Kilmore, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
On a ridge top in Kilmore, County Galway, a series of low, grassy banks and shallow ditches trace the outline of something that has been slowly disappearing into the landscape for a very long time.
The site reads as a circular enclosure defined by a fosse, which is essentially a defensive or boundary ditch dug into the earth, with three further banks and two additional intervening fosses surrounding it, giving an overall diameter of around 37 metres. It is the kind of place that asks more questions than it answers.
By 1930, when the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it, the feature was already described as an oval mound measuring approximately 40 metres by 25 metres. Whatever was once here has since settled further into the ground, leaving only the poorly preserved earthworks visible today. The landowner carried a vague local tradition that the spot had been used for burial, which is not uncommon for ridge-top enclosures of this type in Ireland. Such sites often served multiple purposes across centuries, and the presence of multiple concentric banks and ditches hints at something more deliberate than a simple field boundary, though the precise function and date of the Kilmore enclosure remain unclear. Its formal classification as an enclosure places it within a broad category of prehistoric and early medieval earthworks found across the country, many of which are similarly ambiguous in origin.