Enclosure, Liskelly, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
On a hill summit in the undulating farmland of north County Galway, a low earthen bank traces the ghost of a roughly circular enclosure.
It is easy to walk past without quite registering what you are seeing, which is part of what makes it worth knowing about. The bank, most legible on its northern arc, describes a space approximately thirty-two metres from north to south and thirty metres from east to west, a modest but deliberate footprint that somebody, at some point, went to considerable trouble to mark out on the highest ground available.
Enclosures of this kind, defined by an earthen bank and sometimes an accompanying ditch, appear across Ireland in considerable numbers and are notoriously difficult to date without excavation. They may be prehistoric, early medieval, or later, and their purposes range from settlement and cattle management to ritual use. What they share is a tendency to occupy prominent positions in the landscape, placing whoever built them in visible command of the surrounding terrain. The Liskelly example fits that pattern precisely, sitting as it does on a hill top rather than in the more sheltered ground below. Time and agricultural activity have reduced the bank to something faint and partial, but enough survives along the northern side to confirm the enclosure's original shape and scale.