Enclosure, Lislea, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
There is a field in Lislea, County Galway, where an ancient enclosure once sat on a gentle rise, oval in plan, roughly forty metres from north to south and twenty-five metres across.
It no longer exists in any meaningful sense. Land reclamation levelled it entirely, leaving behind only the faintest suggestion of a raised platform, the kind of subtle ground-swelling that most people would walk across without a second thought.
The enclosure was recorded on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1932, which means it was still sufficiently visible at that point to be mapped. Enclosures of this type, often circular or oval earthworks defined by a bank and ditch, are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish landscape and are generally associated with early medieval settlement, though their functions varied considerably. What happened at Lislea between the 1932 survey and the present is a familiar story across rural Ireland: land improvement schemes, drainage works, and the steady pressure to bring marginal ground into agricultural use gradually erased features that had survived for well over a thousand years. The enclosure at Lislea did not survive that process.