Enclosure, Gorteen, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Gorteen, Co. Clare

Beneath the improved pasture at Gorteen in County Clare, a small stone enclosure has effectively ceased to exist above ground, absorbed into the landscape during agricultural improvements carried out in the 1960s and 70s.

Nothing marks the spot today, yet the site was real enough to appear on the 1921 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, recorded as a subrectangular enclosure measuring roughly 19.5 metres east-northeast to west-southwest and 15.5 metres north-northwest to south-southeast.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp documented it in the period 1914 to 1916, labelling it 'A' on his survey map of what he called the 'Gorteen Group of Forts'. Westropp's description is precise and evocative: a house-ring, barely fifty feet across, with a wall six or seven feet thick built of coarse cragg stones. A house-ring is a circular or near-circular walled enclosure thought to have served as a domestic settlement, the wall itself providing both structural support and a degree of protection for whatever stood within. The wall Westropp measured was thin by the standards of the larger stone forts of the Burren, but the rough limestone rubble construction he notes is typical of the region, where rock outcrops so close to the surface that it practically offers itself up as building material, as the gently sloping field at Gorteen still demonstrates. That shallow bedrock, visible in places even now, is likely part of the reason the enclosure was so vulnerable once the land was brought into more intensive use.

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Pete F
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