Enclosure, Rosleague, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Rosleague, Co. Galway

On a steep-sided promontory dividing Ballynakill Harbour from Bearna Dhearg Bay in Connemara, there was once a large erratic boulder of white granite and a small enclosure beside it.

There is no longer. The promontory is now covered by a fir plantation, and neither the stone nor the enclosure it adjoined can be seen. What makes this site quietly strange is precisely that absence: a place recorded and described, now entirely swallowed.

In 1914, a writer named Redington documented the granite boulder, noting its height at approximately 1.5 metres and its length and width at around 0.85 metres each. An erratic boulder is one transported by glacial movement from its original bedrock, often ending up far from its geological source, which gives such stones an air of displacement even before any human significance is attached to them. Whether this particular stone held any prehistoric meaning is not recorded, but its position crowning a prominent headland, with a small enclosure immediately to its east, suggests it was at minimum noticed and incorporated into the landscape by whoever built that enclosure. The wider area adds to the sense of a once-active prehistoric environment: a pair of standing stones lies roughly 250 metres to the south-southwest, and a pre-bog wall, meaning a wall that predates the formation of the peat layer above it and is therefore likely of considerable antiquity, runs along the south-eastern slopes of the same hill.

The fir plantation that now blankets the promontory makes any surface inspection of the site essentially fruitless. The interest here is less in what can be seen than in the cluster of features that once existed in close proximity, each now erased or obscured to varying degrees, leaving only the topography of the headland itself as evidence that something was once here worth marking.

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Pete F
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