Enclosure, Mountkelly, Co. Galway

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Mountkelly, Co. Galway

In a field in County Galway, the ground holds the ghost of a boundary that once meant something.

The enclosure at Mountkelly is barely there at all now, flattened to the point where only a faint trace of its fosse survives along the eastern and southern edges. A fosse, in this context, is simply a ditch dug as part of a defensive or demarcating boundary, the kind that would originally have accompanied an earthen bank. What remains measures no more than about one and a half metres wide, and you would need to know where to look.

By the time the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was published in 1933, the enclosure was still legible enough to be recorded as an oval shape oriented roughly northwest to southeast, approximately 45 metres along its longer axis and 35 metres across. It was partially planted with trees at that point, and a large opening was visible to the north. The site overlooks a turlough to the south, one of those seasonally flooded limestone lakes peculiar to the west of Ireland, which vanish in summer and reappear with the winter rains. The positioning is telling; many early enclosures in Ireland were deliberately sited in relation to water features, whether for practical reasons or otherwise. A reference from around 1975 confirms that even by then the monument had been effectively levelled, reduced to the faint outline that persists today.

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