What is recorded here

Enclosure in Sawnagh is a rectangular field in County Galway pastureland, first mapped in 1838 with bushes along each side and a roadway cutting across its centre. By 1912 the bushes had vanished and a ditch appeared around the wall, but by 1984 only a faint low platform remained, half buried under tillage and half lost to grazing. A local person still called it a fort, though they could no longer picture it, suggesting the land itself had forgotten the shape before the people did.

In pastureland. Marked on the 1838 edition of the OS 6-inch map as a rectangular field (c. 48m NW-SE; c. 43m NE-SW) with an external line of bushes along each side of it. A NE-SE roadway ran roughly across the centre of the interior and the area to the SE of it was completely planted with bushes. On the OS 1:2500 plan (surveyed 1912-16) the field wall is surrounded by a fosse or ditch (max. Wth c. 6m) and all the bushes have been cleared away. On inspection in February 1984 all that was visible on the ground was a low platform defined by a slight scarp that was barely identifiable around the N half of the monument. The N half of the interior was under tillage while the S half was under pasture. A lot of field boundaries in the area had been recently cleared. A local person regarded the monument as a ‘fort’ but had no recollection of what it looked like. Its outline is clearly visible on Google aerial photographs (Google 2018, last accessed 21 September 2018). Compiled by: Olive Alcock Date of upload: 21 September 2018

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