Enclosure, Knockyclovaun, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
In the townland of Knockyclovaun, in County Clare, there is an enclosure old enough to have been recorded and catalogued, yet quiet enough that almost nothing about it has made its way into the public record.
It sits on the map as a classified monument, a shape drawn around a patch of ground that somebody, at some point, judged worth preserving in name if not yet in detail.
An enclosure, in the archaeological sense, is a broad category covering anything from a ringfort, which was a circular earthen bank surrounding a farmstead in early medieval Ireland, to a more ancient ritual or boundary feature. The term is often used when a site has been identified from aerial photography or field survey but not yet fully investigated. Knockyclovaun is a rural townland in Clare, a county with a remarkably dense concentration of such monuments, particularly along and around the limestone plateau of the Burren. Whether this enclosure belongs to that tradition, or represents something older or more functional, remains unrecorded in any source currently available to the public.