Enclosure, Moat, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
In the rolling pastureland of North Galway, a modest earthen bank curves through a field, rising no higher than 0.7 metres at its tallest point.
To a passing eye it might read as nothing more than a slightly uneven rise in the ground, the kind of feature that gets absorbed quietly into the agricultural landscape over centuries. What it actually represents is the surviving southern fragment of an oval enclosure that once measured roughly 80 metres along its longest axis, a structure old enough and significant enough to have been mapped by the Ordnance Survey, yet worn down so thoroughly that only half of it remains legible at all.
The 1946 third edition of the OS six-inch map recorded the full oval, oriented northeast to southwest at approximately 80 metres, and northwest to southeast at around 40 metres. At some point after that survey, a field boundary was driven across the northern half of the enclosure, running northwest to northeast, effectively erasing that portion from the ground. Enclosures of this general type, roughly oval or circular earthworks defined by a bank and sometimes a ditch, are common across Ireland and tend to be associated with early medieval settlement, though without excavation it is rarely possible to say more than that about any individual example. What is certain here is that the enclosure predates its own destruction; the field boundary that bisected it was imposed on something already ancient. The southern arc of bank is all that confirms the site ever existed in the form the map recorded.