Enclosure, Ballycorey, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballycorey, Co. Clare

On the east-facing slope of a valley in County Clare, partially absorbed into reclaimed pasture, sits an ancient enclosure that has survived largely by accident.

Its defining feature is a scarp, a low earthen edge or drop in the ground, running from northwest to southwest and standing only between 0.3 and 0.5 metres high at most points. That modest height is enough to betray a deliberate, very old boundary, one that satellite imagery from 2011 to 2013 still picks out clearly despite the surrounding agricultural reworking. A cairn of stones, roughly a metre high and two metres wide, sits just outside the scarp at the southeast, its purpose unrecorded but its placement deliberate enough to suggest it was not simply dumped there during land clearance.

The enclosure measures approximately 38.4 metres on its northwest to southeast axis and 38 metres northeast to southwest, making it nearly but not quite circular, a form associated across Ireland with early settlement and agricultural organisation stretching back through the early medieval period and beyond. The 1916 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it with hachures, the small lines surveyors used to indicate a slope or earthwork, with the western side marked by a curve in the field boundary that still exists today, now carrying dense vegetation along its inner edge. The interior slopes noticeably downhill to the east. A second, less certain scarp near the southeast edge of the enclosure may relate to the later reclamation of the surrounding field rather than to the original structure. The broader landscape around Ballycorey was once considerably richer in such features: a site known as Loughgirroga Fort survives about 230 metres to the southeast in uncleared scrub, and a larger enclosure once lay roughly 350 metres to the southeast in an area that has since been covered by modern housing.

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