Enclosure, Pollnahallia, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Pollnahallia, Co. Galway

In the pastureland around Pollnahallia, a circular outline roughly forty metres across sits quietly beneath the grass, invisible to anyone walking past but legible from above.

It belongs to a category of monument common across Ireland yet still not fully understood in every instance: the enclosed settlement, most likely the remains of a ringfort or similar circular enclosure, where a bank and ditch once defined a farmstead or place of refuge. These earthworks survive in their thousands across the country, often reduced over centuries of agriculture to nothing more than a crop mark or a faint shadow in the turf.

This particular example came to light not through excavation or fieldwork but through the scrutiny of satellite imagery. Jean-Charles Caillère identified and reported the site after examining Google Earth aerial photography dated March 2019, in which the circular outline becomes visible, most probably as a soil or vegetation mark of the kind that appears when buried or ploughed-out features retain moisture or drain differently from the surrounding ground. The site has not, on the available evidence, been subject to any ground investigation, so its date and precise character remain open questions.

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Pete F
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