Enclosure, Racoona, Co. Galway

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Racoona, Co. Galway

In the level grassland of Racoona in north County Galway, there is an enclosure that exists almost entirely on paper.

Recorded on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1934, it appears as a neat square outline, roughly forty metres on each side. Walk the ground today, and there is nothing to see. No earthwork, no ridge, no crop mark visible to the naked eye. The place survives only as a cartographic ghost, a shape drawn by surveyors who presumably had some reason to draw it.

Enclosures of this kind, broadly speaking, are defined areas bounded by a bank, ditch, wall, or some combination of these, and they turn up across Ireland in a wide range of forms and periods. Some are early medieval farmsteads, others are prehistoric, and a number are associated with ecclesiastical or ritual use. Without excavation or further survey, a vanished square enclosure forty metres across tells you very little beyond its shape and its approximate location. What the 1934 map captured may have already been a faint remnant by then, enough for a surveyor to record but too slight to endure another few decades of agricultural use. The fact that nothing now remains above ground does not mean nothing remains below it.

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