Enclosure, Carnaun, Co. Galway

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Carnaun, Co. Galway

In a field in Carnaun, County Galway, something large once stood that most people walking past today would struggle to identify at all.

What remains is a D-shaped enclosure, roughly 48.5 metres east to west and 45 metres north to south, defined not by an upright wall but by a wide, collapsed spread of drystone rubble. That collapse is itself telling: the wall, now reduced to between 0.4 and 0.6 metres in height, was originally somewhere between six and eight metres wide, suggesting a structure of considerable mass, even if its original height is now impossible to determine.

Enclosures of this kind, where a roughly circular or sub-circular area was bounded by a drystone wall, were a common feature of early Irish settlement and land management, serving variously as farmsteads, animal enclosures, or defended homesteads depending on their scale and context. This particular example sits within a broader field system, meaning it was once part of an organised agricultural landscape rather than an isolated feature. Recorded by Cody in 1989, it is now very poorly preserved, its form only legible on close inspection. What makes it slightly less lonely is that a second, similar enclosure lies approximately 30 metres to the southwest, raising the possibility that the two were related elements of the same working landscape, though the evidence is too thin to say more than that.

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Pete F
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