Enclosure, Attiregan, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
In the gently undulating farmland of Attiregan in north County Galway, a circular depression in the ground marks the ghost of an enclosure that has been quietly shrinking for centuries.
By the time the Ordnance Survey recorded it on their six-inch map in 1933, it measured roughly fifty metres in diameter. What survives today has contracted considerably, to a circular area of around thirty-three metres across, defined by a denuded bank, meaning the earthwork has been so worn down by time and agriculture that it is more suggestion than structure.
Enclosures of this type are common across the Irish countryside, most often associated with the early medieval period, when a raised or embanked ring, sometimes called a ringfort or rath, served as a farmstead enclosure protecting a family, their livestock, and their dwelling. The external fosse, a ditch dug around the outside of the bank to reinforce it, is still faintly traceable on the eastern to south-eastern arc of this example, which is often where such features survive longest, sheltered from the prevailing weather and the worst of ploughing. The rest has largely melded back into the landscape, leaving only the faintest topographical hint of whatever domestic life once organised itself within this circle.