Enclosure, Tullira, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
There is something quietly unsettling about a monument that has effectively vanished from the ground but can still be read from the sky.
In cleared farmland that was once part of the demesne of Tullira in County Galway, an oval enclosure measuring roughly 77 metres north to south and 68 metres east to west has been fading from the landscape for well over a century, until by November 1982 a field inspection found almost nothing left at surface level beyond a faint scarp at the northern edge. Yet its ghost persists in aerial imagery, where the outline recorded on the 1921 Ordnance Survey six-inch map remains legible to anyone who knows where to look.
The enclosure was already a known feature when the first Ordnance Survey mapped it in 1838, recorded as a subcircular earthwork. By 1921 it had begun to lose definition on the ground, represented on maps largely by a curving line of hachures, the cartographic convention used to suggest a slope or bank, running from the south-west to the north. A field description from 1973 captures it at an intermediate stage of disappearance, calling it a large oval flat area set apart by a low scarp, with old cultivation ridges running through the interior on a broadly east-north-east to west-south-west alignment. Those ridge-and-furrow patterns are the traces of former tillage, the parallel earthen banks thrown up by repeated ploughing over generations. Within the enclosure's south-eastern sector, a hut site was also noted, suggesting the earthwork was at some point associated with domestic occupation, though the precise date and nature of that use remains unclear. The site sits in what was once the grounds of Tullira, the Galway estate perhaps best known for its association with Edward Martyn, the playwright and patron of the Irish Literary Revival.