Lismafadda, Fearmore, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Enclosures

Lismafadda, Fearmore, Co. Galway

In the waterlogged pastureland of Fearmore in County Galway, a low hummock rises just enough above the surrounding marsh to carry the remains of a double-banked enclosure that has been quietly deteriorating into its own overgrowth for centuries.

What makes the site quietly odd is its shape: most early Irish enclosures are roughly circular, the familiar ringfort form found across the country, but this one is rectangular, measuring around 28 metres north to south and 25 metres east to west. That geometric regularity, sitting on a natural rise in otherwise boggy ground, gives the place a slightly deliberate quality, as though whoever chose the spot was working with both the landscape and against it.

The enclosure is defined by two banks of earth and stone separated by a fosse, which is the term for a deliberately cut ditch forming part of a defensive or boundary system. The inner bank survives as a steeply sloping feature along the southern and western sides, while along the northern and eastern edges the ground has been shaped into a scarp, a near-vertical face cut into the natural slope, rather than a built-up bank. The outer bank is largely intact, though it disappears at the north-east corner and is hidden by vegetation to the east. The interior is slightly sunken, a detail that sometimes indicates the collapse of earlier structures beneath. Encircling the base of the entire hummock is a separate, shallower bank and fosse, a feature that does not obviously belong to the main enclosure and may date only to the nineteenth century, perhaps a field boundary or drainage work imposed on a landscape that was already ancient.

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Pete F
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