Enclosure (Large), Moneyveen, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
On a grassland ridge in Moneyveen, a large pear-shaped earthwork sits quietly near a townland boundary, its purpose still uncertain.
Measuring roughly 76 metres across in both directions, it is defined by two banks with an intervening fosse, which is simply a ditch dug between the two raised earthen ridges. The inner bank is legible at the north and south, but elsewhere the ground has eroded back to a scarp rather than a proper bank. The fosse and outer bank survive from the southwest round to the north, and a causewayed gap, a deliberate raised crossing over the ditch about 3.5 metres wide, at the northwest may mark where the original entrance once stood.
What makes the enclosure genuinely difficult to categorise is a combination of features that point in more than one direction. Within its southeast quadrant lies a cillín or children's burial ground, a type of site in Ireland historically associated with the unconsecrated burial of unbaptised infants, often placed near early ecclesiastical land. That detail, combined with the enclosure's considerable size and its position close to the townland boundary, has led archaeologists to consider whether it might originally have been an early ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or oval earthwork that defined monastic or church properties in early medieval Ireland, long before any stone building arrived. A possible rath, a ringfort of the kind used as a defended farmstead in the early medieval period, lies about 90 metres to the north-northeast, suggesting the area may have seen layered activity across several centuries. The enclosure itself is poorly preserved, and no firm date has been established, leaving the ecclesiastical reading as a possibility rather than a conclusion.