Enclosure, Caherbullog, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Caherbullog, Co. Clare

On the eastern edge of a level terrace above the Caher River in County Clare, a low spread of collapsed stone traces the outline of an enclosure that has quietly confused those who tried to record it.

The Ordnance Survey mapped it as a circular enclosure in 1840, then returned in 1916 and drew it as rectangular. Both observations were, in their way, accurate: what survives is a subrectangular form with slightly rounded corners, the kind of shape that sits ambiguously between those two categories and resists easy classification.

The enclosure measures roughly 38 metres north to south and 32 metres east to west, its boundary defined by a collapsed stone spread between four and five metres wide, now standing no more than a metre above the interior at its highest points. Sometime after the enclosure was built, a field wall was laid directly on top of that earlier boundary, further obscuring whatever original profile it once had. There is no clear entrance, though a gap of about 60 centimetres in the centre of the northern wall is a possible candidate. Inside, the ground is mostly level, dropping only gently across the eastern third toward the river below. Two smaller rectangular structures survive within, their walls also collapsed, one tucked into the south-west corner and another positioned midway along the northern wall. These are likely relatively recent animal pens rather than anything of antiquity, though they add another layer to a site already complicated by centuries of reuse and overbuilding. The whole is now largely smothered in hazel scrub, growing across rough pasture that makes the enclosure easy to miss even when you are standing close to it.

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Pete F
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