Enclosure, Mulpit, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
Beneath a modern housing development in Mulpit, Co. Galway, there lies a circular enclosure that exists now only as a cartographic memory.
The site was recorded on the 1933 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, marked as a roughly circular earthwork with a diameter of approximately 37 metres. Today, no trace of it is visible above ground; houses occupy the land where it once stood.
Circular enclosures of this kind are a familiar, if still imperfectly understood, feature of the Irish countryside. They range from ring forts used as defended farmsteads in the early medieval period to prehistoric enclosures whose purposes remain unclear. Without further excavation or documentation, it is impossible to say which category this particular site belonged to, or when it was built and abandoned. What is known is that by the time the 1933 Ordnance Survey map was produced, it was legible enough as an earthwork to be recorded, and at some point after that it was lost to development. The gap between those two moments, the map and the modern houses, is where the history of this place effectively ends.