Enclosure, Brickhill, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Brickhill, Co. Clare

In the townland of Brickhill, in County Clare, there is an enclosure.

That much is certain. Beyond the bare fact of its existence and its place on the archaeological record, almost nothing has yet been made publicly available about what it looks like, how old it is, or what purpose it once served. It sits, for now, as a named but largely undescribed feature in the landscape, waiting for documentation to catch up with it.

Enclosures of this kind, when they do yield their details, tend to belong to one of several broad categories familiar across the Irish countryside: a ringfort, which was typically a circular earthen bank enclosing a farmstead during the early medieval period; a cashel, which is the stone equivalent; or occasionally something older or more ambiguous, a field boundary or a ceremonial space whose original function has blurred across the centuries. Brickhill is a townland in Clare, a county whose underlying limestone karst has both preserved and obscured countless such features, sometimes swallowing earthworks gradually into the ground, sometimes keeping them in remarkable condition simply because the land was never ploughed. Without further detail, it is impossible to say which of these fates has befallen this particular site, or which category it belongs to.

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