King of Wood, Cregmore, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Enclosures

King of Wood, Cregmore, Co. Galway

There is something quietly unsettling about a place that exists primarily as an absence.

At Cregmore in County Galway, in a townland carrying the evocative name King of Wood, a circular enclosure once sat in the landscape. Today, no visible surface trace survives. What was there is now, to all practical purposes, gone.

The enclosure is known almost entirely from the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which recorded it as a circular feature roughly twenty metres in diameter. It lay approximately forty metres to the south-east of a ringfort, the kind of earthen or stone enclosure, typically dating from the early medieval period, that once served as a farmstead or small defended settlement. The proximity of the two features is suggestive; paired or clustered enclosures are not unusual in the Irish landscape, and a secondary enclosure near a ringfort might have served any number of agricultural or domestic purposes. But because nothing remains above ground, and because the cartographic record is the main surviving evidence, speculation runs ahead of what can actually be known. The OS surveyors who mapped this part of north Galway in the nineteenth century captured something that has since been erased, whether by ploughing, drainage, or simple time.

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