Enclosure (Large), Farranablake, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Enclosures

Enclosure (Large), Farranablake, Co. Galway

A country road cuts straight through what was once a circular earthwork roughly 70 metres across, slicing the monument in two as neatly as any surveyor's line.

On one side of the tarmac, the enclosure's earthen bank has been absorbed into a modern graveyard. On the other, it has all but vanished, surviving only as a faint, eroded arc in the south-western quadrant. The living have long since moved in around the edges of the ancient and the dead, and the boundary between the three has grown difficult to read.

This site on a ridge in the undulating pastureland of Farranablake was recorded by Knox in 1918 under the name Rathnacruacha, a designation that suggests a rath, the term for a roughly circular earthen enclosure common throughout early medieval Ireland, typically associated with a single farmstead or small settlement. A rath of 70 metres in diameter would have been a substantial one. By the time Cody documented it in 1989, the road had long since done its bisecting work, and much of the bank to the west had been reduced to a barely legible swell in the ground, visible mainly through a 1970 aerial photograph. East of the road, where the bank still stands to an external height of around one metre, the graveyard has grown up within and around the monument, with burials placed both inside the enclosure and along the outer face of the bank itself.

The graveyard retains a quiet layering of the devotional and the ancient. Two burials sit side by side in the interior, one marked with a modern stone cross, and a large wooden crucifix stands roughly two metres to the south. The effect is of a place that has been quietly in use, in one form or another, for a very long time, with each generation adding its own markers to a space it perhaps did not fully understand but evidently felt worth keeping.

Rated 0 out of 5

Visitor Notes

Review type for post source and places source type not found
Added by
Picture of Pete F
Pete F
IrishHistory.com is passionate about helping people discover and connect with the rich stories of their local communities.
Please use the form below to submit any photos you may have of Enclosure (Large), Farranablake, Co. Galway. We're happy to take any suggested edits you may have too. Please be advised it will take us some time to get to these submissions. Thank you.
Name
Email
Message
Upload images/documents
Maximum file size: 50 MB
If you'd like to add an image or a PDF please do it here.