Enclosure, Lissylisheen, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Lissylisheen, Co. Clare

On the outer rim of a limestone plateau in County Clare, where the ground drops away sharply to the north-east, there sits a small enclosure that refuses easy categorisation.

It is subrectangular in plan, roughly 18.3 metres north to south and 22 metres east to west, bounded by a drystone wall, that is, a wall of stacked stone laid without mortar, rising somewhere between 0.7 and 1.4 metres depending on where you measure it. The feature is assessed as apparently modern in date, which in archaeological terms can mean anything from the post-medieval period onward, and that ambiguity is part of what makes it quietly interesting. It is not ancient in the way that a ringfort or a megalithic tomb is ancient, yet it occupies a landscape shaped by centuries of land use, and its modest walls still mark a deliberate act of enclosure on a windswept plateau edge.

What gives this enclosure its particular context is its relationship to the structures around it. Roughly ten metres to the west lies a considerably larger enclosure, and the whole cluster sits within an established field system that extends across the townland and into neighbouring areas. Lissylisheen, like much of the Clare limestone plateau, would have seen successive waves of land organisation, from early medieval farming arrangements through to post-Famine consolidation and reorganisation of holdings. Drystone walling of this kind was a practical response to a landscape that offered abundant stone and little soil depth, and the Burren and its fringes are still edged with such walls in various states of repair and collapse. Whether this particular enclosure served as a stock pen, a small garden plot, or some other agricultural function is not recorded, but its position at the plateau's edge, with open ground falling away beyond it, suggests it was built with both boundary-marking and containment in mind.

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Pete F
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