Enclosure, Tullybeg, Co. Galway

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Tullybeg, Co. Galway

In the reclaimed pastureland of Tullybeg in County Galway, a low stony mound sits in a field, its original form considerably harder to read than it once was.

What the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded as a neat circular enclosure had already shifted in character by the time the third edition was published in 1932, which showed a penannular oval, that is, an almost-complete ring left open at one end, oriented with its gap towards the north-north-west. The overall dimensions at that point ran roughly forty metres on a north-west to south-east axis and about thirty metres east to west.

What remains today is a subcircular stony mound, approximately twenty-eight metres east to west and twenty-six and a half metres north to south. The southern half of the interior has been robbed out, the material presumably carted away for use elsewhere on the land, and the whole structure has been further obscured by the dumping of boulders and gravel. Enclosures of this general type, which in an Irish context often indicate the site of a ringfort or a related early medieval settlement enclosure, can be difficult to date or interpret precisely once the defining earthworks have been disturbed. Here the disturbance has been considerable, leaving a site that now registers more as an irregularity in the ground than a legible monument. Between the OS maps and the surviving mound, there is already a measurable shrinkage: the recorded dimensions have contracted, and the open north-north-west gap that gave the penannular form its character is no longer clearly distinguishable from the general degradation.

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Pete F
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