Enclosure, Toonagh, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Toonagh, Co. Clare

In the improved pasture of Toonagh, County Clare, a field boundary cuts straight through what was once a significant oval enclosure, slicing off its south-eastern sector as though it simply were not there.

The enclosure is invisible at ground level today, which makes it a peculiar kind of monument: recorded, mapped, documented, and yet practically imperceptible to anyone walking the land.

What we know of its shape and extent comes from the 1841 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which depicted it as an oval measuring approximately 38 metres north to south and 33 metres east to west. Enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish landscape; many are the remains of ringforts, the circular or oval ditched and embanked farmsteads that served as the basic unit of rural settlement from the early medieval period onward. Whether this particular example originated as a defended homestead, an enclosure for livestock, or something else entirely cannot be said from the available evidence. What the 1841 map preserves is a plan of something that had already been substantially altered by the time surveyors visited, and which has since been further obscured by agricultural improvement and the intrusion of later field boundaries.

The site sits on a gentle slope facing roughly east-north-east, overlooking a quietly undulating stretch of Clare countryside. A slightly raised area survives to the north-west and south-east of the field boundary that now bisects the monument, which is perhaps the only physical hint, at ground level, that anything lies beneath the grass. A field gate sits in the boundary wall close to where it cuts across the enclosure to the north-east and south-west.

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