Enclosure, Leamaneigh More, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
In the townland of Leamaneigh More, in the limestone karst country of County Clare, there sits an enclosure that has been formally recorded as a monument yet remains almost entirely undocumented in the public domain.
It is the kind of site that appears on a map as a classified archaeological feature and then, when you reach for any further detail, offers almost nothing back.
Leamaneigh More takes its name from the Irish "Léim an Fhia", meaning the deer's leap, the same root shared by the nearby Leamaneh Castle, the ruined tower house associated with the O'Brien family and the formidable Máire Rua O'Brien, who held it in the seventeenth century. The broader landscape is one of the most archaeologically layered in Ireland, sitting on the southern edge of the Burren, where thin soils over carboniferous limestone have preserved field walls, wedge tombs, ring forts, and enclosures across millennia. An enclosure, in archaeological terms, is broadly any defined area bounded by a bank, wall, ditch, or combination of these, and such features in Clare range from prehistoric ceremonial sites to early medieval farmsteads. Which category this particular example belongs to is, for now, a matter of open record but closed detail.