Enclosure, Áit Tí Seonac, Co. Galway

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Áit Tí Seonac, Co. Galway

At Áit Tí Seonac in County Galway, the most significant thing about a particular archaeological site is that there is essentially nothing left to see.

An enclosure, roughly thirty metres in diameter, once occupied a north-facing slope in open pastureland, but field walls have cut through it at the north-east and south-south-west, and no visible surface trace survives at all. The place exists now almost entirely as a cartographic memory.

The enclosure was recorded on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1947, which gives at least a mid-twentieth-century point of reference for its outline. Enclosures of this general type, circular or sub-circular boundaries defined by banks, ditches, or stone walls, are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish landscape, and they serve a wide range of functions across many centuries, from early medieval settlement enclosures to later agricultural use. What happened to this particular example is a familiar story across the west of Ireland: gradual absorption into the working field system, the boundaries of later land division overwriting the earlier ones until the older form disappears entirely.

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