Enclosure, Oatfield, Co. Galway

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Oatfield, Co. Galway

In a field in Oatfield, County Galway, there is an enclosure that has almost entirely ceased to exist.

What remains is barely legible as archaeology: a few traces of a bank curving from south through west to north-north-east, and a shallow external fosse, the term for a defensive or boundary ditch, running from south to west. A drainage ditch and a field fence cut across the southern end, and recent land development has levelled what little had survived. The enclosure now asks rather a lot of the imagination.

Before it was reduced to these faint traces, the site was a subcircular enclosure measuring roughly 42 metres on its north-west to south-east axis and about 37.5 metres across the other way. Enclosures of this general type are among the most common archaeological monuments in Ireland, typically associated with early medieval settlement, though without excavation it is impossible to say with certainty what period this one belongs to or what it once contained. They usually consisted of an earthen bank and outer ditch defining a circular or oval area, possibly enclosing a farmstead, a high-status residence, or occasionally a site with ritual associations. That the bank and fosse here are only partially traceable, and that the whole has been further damaged by modern groundworks, places it firmly in the category of monuments that survive more as a coordinate on a map than as anything a visitor would recognise on the ground.

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Pete F
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