Enclosure, Ashford, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ashford, Co. Galway

At the northern edge of Ballinasloe, in a stretch of level grassland, there is a piece of ground that does not quite match its surroundings.

The interior sits lower than the terrain around it, and a faint, eroded scarp traces what was once the boundary of an enclosure roughly 46 metres across. It is easy to miss, and easier still to walk past without recognising it for what it is.

When the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced in the nineteenth century, the feature was recorded as U-shaped, which already hints that something had disturbed its original form. What survives today is a subcircular enclosure, the kind of roughly circular earthwork that appears across Ireland in various periods and served various purposes, from settlement to ritual to enclosing livestock. Here, the northern portion has been quarried away entirely, and the townland boundary has since been drawn across the eastern edge, further obscuring whatever once defined that side. The scarp that remains is degraded to the point where the enclosure reads more as a subtle shift in the ground than as an earthwork in the conventional sense.

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Pete F
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