Enclosure, Newhall, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Newhall, Co. Clare

In a large pasture field near Killone Lough in County Clare, something old is hiding in plain sight beneath the grass.

An oval enclosure, roughly 40 metres north to south and 30 metres east to west, shows up not as a ruin or a monument but as a cropmark, the faint differential staining that buried features leave on growing vegetation when seen from above. It takes a satellite photograph, in this case one taken via Google Earth in 2011, to make the shape legible at all. A Bing aerial image from May 2015 adds a little more: a slightly raised area along the northern arc, defined by a low scarp running from the north-west to the north-east, just enough of a rise to suggest that something deliberate was once built or bounded here.

What exactly the enclosure was is not recorded. It sits in the same field as two ringforts, one about 150 metres to the south and another roughly 260 metres further on. Ringforts, which are circular or oval enclosures typically dating from the early medieval period, were the most common form of rural settlement in Ireland for several centuries, and their clustering in a single field is not unusual. Whether this enclosure is related to those two features, earlier than them, or of a different character entirely, remains an open question. The landscape around Killone Lough, a quiet stretch of water in east Clare, clearly held more activity over the centuries than the present-day pasture suggests.

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Pete F
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