Enclosure, Brackernagh, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
In the undulating grassland of Brackernagh in County Galway, there is an archaeological site that no longer exists in any visible sense.
What was once recorded as a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres in diameter has left no trace on the surface, no earthwork, no ditch line, no bank. The ground simply continues, unmarked, as if nothing were ever there.
The enclosure was noted on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1946, which means that by the mid-twentieth century there was still enough evidence for a cartographer to plot it. Circular enclosures of this kind are among the more common monument types in the Irish landscape; they generally date from the early medieval period and would have served as enclosed farmsteads or settlement sites, defined by an earthen bank or a combination of bank and ditch. At around thirty metres across, this one would have been modest in scale. Whether it was levelled by agricultural improvement before or after the map was drawn is not recorded. What is clear is that between the moment a surveyor marked it and the present, the last physical traces were erased. It survives now only as a coordinate, a diameter, and a category.