Hilltop enclosure, Clooncah, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Enclosures
On a hilltop in County Galway, a roughly oval earthwork sits quietly in pastureland, its original form so thoroughly worn down that it reads now as little more than a broad, shallow depression in the grass.
What survives is a subcircular enclosure measuring roughly 85 metres northwest to southeast and 65 metres northeast to southwest, defined by a fosse, which is essentially a ditch dug to delineate or defend a site, cut into the hillside. A modern field bank runs through the middle of it, dividing the enclosure in two and adding a layer of agricultural pragmatism over whatever ceremonial or defensive logic once shaped the place.
When an inspector visited in 1967, the enclosure still retained something closer to its original character. The site was recorded at the time as being bounded by a collapsed stone wall, overgrown enough to resemble an earthen bank, with a big, wide, deep fosse inside. In the decades that followed, the site was levelled, reducing that fosse to a shallow depression around five metres wide. Some evidence of the outer bank or wall persists, traced not by stonework but by a band of nettles and thistles visible along the northwestern to northern arc, plants that tend to colonise disturbed or nutrient-rich ground where old structures once stood. At the northern edge, faint traces suggest a possible causeway once crossed the fosse, a common feature of enclosed sites where a controlled point of entry was part of the design. The interior of the enclosure sits slightly lower than the surrounding ground outside it, a subtle but telling detail of how such earthworks were engineered. Immediately to the east lies a recorded battlefield site, which raises questions about the relationship between the two, though the nature of that connection remains unexplored in the available record.