Enclosure, Carrownagoul, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
At Carrownagoul in County Clare, a pair of concentric earthwork rings sits on a low ridge in open pasture, so weathered by time that most visitors would walk straight past without noticing anything at all.
This is a bivallate enclosure, meaning one with two distinct boundaries, and what survives today is barely a whisper of what was once a clearly defined, deliberately constructed space. The outer ring measures roughly 78 metres from northeast to southwest and about 64 metres from northwest to southeast; the inner subcircular area is somewhat smaller, approximately 46 metres east to west and 40 metres north to south. Both are now readable only as low scarps, the kind of subtle earthen terracing that catches the eye mainly in raking winter light, and faint traces of a bank survive along the western and northwestern arc.
The site appears on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1842, and is hachured again on the later Cassini edition of 1920, indicating it was still legible enough in the early twentieth century to be worth marking. Enclosures of this general type are associated in Ireland with early medieval settlement, often interpreted as the remains of a ringfort or its more elaborate double-ringed variant, though without excavation it is impossible to say with certainty what the interior once held or who built it. What the cartographic record does confirm is that the earthwork has been quietly losing ground for at least the past century, the inner scarp now so gentle as to be almost indistinguishable from the natural contours of the ridge.