Enclosure, Lisdonnellroe, Co. Galway

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Lisdonnellroe, Co. Galway

Some places earn their historical significance not from what survives above ground but from what has quietly disappeared into it.

At Lisdonnellroe in County Galway, a circular enclosure once stood on a gentle rise in undulating farmland to the north-east of Callow Lough. It measured roughly twenty metres in diameter, a modest footprint even by the standards of such sites, and today there is no visible surface trace of it whatsoever.

Circular enclosures of this kind are among the more common but least understood features of the Irish rural landscape. They may represent the remains of a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typical of the early medieval period, or possibly something older. The word "lios" embedded in the townland name Lisdonnellroe is itself suggestive, being an Irish term often associated with exactly this kind of enclosed settlement. What we know of the Lisdonnellroe enclosure comes largely from the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, the meticulous nineteenth-century surveys that captured landscape features long before modern agriculture began to erase them. By the time Olive Alcock, Kathy de hÓra, and Paul Gosling compiled the Archaeological Inventory of County Galway, published in 1999, the enclosure had already left no mark on the ground that a visitor could detect.

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