Enclosure, Lowville, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
In a field of gently undulating grassland in County Galway, a faint circle in the vegetation marks where something once stood.
No walls remain, no earthwork rises above the surrounding ground, and the trees that once filled the interior have long since gone. What persists is just a ring of differential growth, roughly 34 metres across, where the soil remembers a boundary that the land surface itself no longer shows.
The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced in Ireland during the mid-nineteenth century, recorded this as a circular tree-filled enclosure, the kind of feature that appears throughout the Irish countryside in various states of survival. Enclosures of this type are broadly associated with early medieval settlement, though without excavation it is difficult to say much with certainty about date or function. What the map captured was already, presumably, a remnant rather than an active site. By the time anyone came to record it archaeologically, the trees had gone entirely, and a drain had been cut through the monument running east to west, further disrupting whatever subsurface deposits might have survived. The Ahascragh River flows roughly 300 metres to the west.