Enclosure, Ballyconry, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
On a low, narrow ridge running north to south in Ballyconry, County Clare, a small drystone enclosure sits in quiet company with its neighbours, the kind of structure that most walkers would pass without a second glance.
What makes it worth pausing over is less any individual drama than the accumulated logic of the landscape: two roughly square enclosures, each around thirty metres across, sitting side by side, their single-course drystone walls still standing between forty centimetres and eighty centimetres high in places, and a network of associated field walls spreading outward from them.
Drystone construction, which uses no mortar and relies entirely on the careful fitting of stones against one another, was a practical and widespread technique in rural Ireland, particularly from the eighteenth century onward when agricultural reorganisation reshaped large tracts of the countryside. The Ballyconry enclosures are thought to date to after 1700, placing them within that broader period of farmland consolidation and enclosure that transformed the west of Ireland in the post-medieval centuries. The two enclosures sit contiguously, the second immediately to the south of the first, and together with the attendant field walls they suggest a small but deliberate system of land management rather than any single isolated feature. The walls themselves are modest, between forty centimetres and one metre wide, but their survival in reasonable condition on this exposed ridge says something about the care of their original construction.