Enclosure (Large), Cloondoorney More, Co. Clare

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Enclosures

Enclosure (Large), Cloondoorney More, Co. Clare

Nobody knew this enclosure was there.

It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey maps of 1842 or 1899, though both editions show a suggestive arrangement of field boundaries tracing a rough oval in roughly the right place. It took satellite imagery, analysed in 2012, to reveal it properly: a large subcircular earthwork enclosing the crown of a low hillock in County Clare, sitting above a spread of bog with Cloondanagh Lough visible to the east.

The enclosure is substantial. It measures around 130 metres east-northeast to west-southwest and 123 metres north-northwest to south-southeast, defined by the remains of a levelled scarp, the kind of raised bank or cut edge that would once have marked a boundary with some authority. Where it survives best, along the northern and eastern side, the scarp still stands between half a metre and just under a metre high, overlooking a natural drop down to the level bog below. Elsewhere it has been almost entirely effaced by centuries of agricultural use; on the western side it is barely traceable, and to the northwest it has disappeared altogether. A shallow fosse, a ditch running parallel to the inner edge of the enclosure, is faintly visible in the central and eastern fields, more legible on satellite imagery than on the ground. At the west-southwest there is what may be an entrance, and from that point a possible trackway, roughly 45 metres long and about 12 metres wide, runs out toward the bogland. A ruined vernacular building, a small structure of the kind associated with post-medieval rural settlement, sits on the scarp at the south-southeast, a later occupation of what was already an old boundary.

On the ground, the monument spreads across three adjoining fields of rough pasture, which makes it easier to walk the circuit and harder to read as a whole. The bog to the south and west gives the site an open, slightly exposed quality, and the views across the low-lying ground are clear in most directions, though forestry to the north cuts off that aspect. The scarp is easiest to read where the eastern field meets the natural slope down to the bog, and that is the most instructive place to stand if you are trying to understand the original scale of the earthwork.

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Pete F
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