Enclosure, Lisnanard, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Lisnanard, Co. Clare

On the townland boundary between Lisnanard and Newtown in County Clare, a circular stone enclosure roughly twenty metres across sits on bare karst pavement, the exposed limestone plateau that gives the Burren its particular character, and has effectively disappeared into the landscape.

Not through ruin or collapse, but through hazel. Dense hazel woodland and low thorn scrub have grown so thickly over the site that a survey team visiting in 1997 could not locate it on the ground at all, despite knowing precisely where to look. The enclosure is not lost in any dramatic sense; it simply refuses to be visited in any conventional way.

The site has been known to cartographers for well over a century and a half. It appears hachured, meaning marked with small lines indicating a raised feature, on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, and is shown again as a solid circular outline on the 1915 edition. Both editions agree on a diameter of roughly twenty metres. What modern satellite imagery reveals, now that the canopy can be viewed from above rather than pushed through on foot, is a low stone wall defining that circle, with field walls radiating outward to the west-northwest and south-southwest. The wall heading south-southwest is particularly telling; it runs along the townland boundary itself, suggesting the enclosure may have served as a fixed point in how this patch of Clare was once organised and divided. About 180 metres to the west-southwest lies the site of a considerably larger enclosure, around sixty metres in diameter, hinting that this corner of the karst once held more structured activity than the current tangle of scrub would suggest.

The hazel cover that defeated ground inspection in 1997 is unlikely to have thinned in the intervening decades. Hazel scrub is a defining feature of the Burren's ecology, and on karst pavement it can be virtually impenetrable. For the moment, this enclosure belongs more to aerial observation than to any walker's itinerary, its low stone wall quietly holding its shape beneath the canopy while field boundaries radiate outward in directions that only a satellite can comfortably read.

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Pete F
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