Mound, Leana, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Mound, Leana, Co. Clare

There is a field in Leana, County Clare, where archaeology survives only as a rumour in the soil.

To the naked eye, it is ordinary improved pasture, level and unremarkable, with nothing to suggest that anything ever stood there. Yet overhead, in satellite imagery captured across several decades, the ghost of a circular mound about sixteen metres across reveals itself as a cropmark, the differential growth of grass above disturbed or compacted earth betraying the outline of something buried beneath.

The mound appears with reasonable confidence on Ordnance Survey mapping, hachured as a distinct circular feature on the 25-inch plan of 1897 and again on the Cassini edition of the 6-inch map published in 1920. Hachuring, the system of short radiating lines used by surveyors to indicate raised ground, suggests the feature was still physically present, or at least legible on the ground, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the time an inspection was carried out in 1998, no surface trace remained. The land had been improved, the mound levelled, the evidence apparently erased. What the satellite imagery confirms, however, is that subsurface archaeological features may still survive intact, meaning the site has been flattened rather than destroyed in any deeper sense. A larger enclosure recorded by the Ordnance Survey roughly ten metres to the east-southeast has met the same fate, also levelled, leaving two monuments that once shared a landscape now sharing only their absence from it.

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Pete F
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