Enclosure, Gortmore, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Gortmore, Co. Clare

On a south-south-westerly facing slope in County Clare, amid rough pasture and outcropping limestone, there sits a small circular enclosure that is easy to walk past without quite registering what you are looking at.

Its defining wall is almost entirely smothered in moss, the stones blending so thoroughly into the surrounding boulders that the structure seems less built than grown. Yet it is clearly deliberate: a near-perfect circle, roughly fifteen metres across, with a wall that in places reaches nearly a metre in external height and swells to almost six metres in overall width, before diminishing on its south-west to north-west arc into a lower, narrower scarp.

Enclosures of this kind, sometimes called cashels when built of dry stone, were a common feature of early medieval Ireland, typically serving as enclosed farmsteads or as demarcated spaces around a dwelling or small settlement. A cashel in the strict sense, a stone-walled ringfort, sits roughly forty-seven metres to the south-west of this enclosure, suggesting the two features may have functioned in relation to one another, perhaps as a main habitation and an associated yard or stock enclosure. The interior of the Gortmore enclosure is level and grass-covered, which in itself hints at some degree of deliberate management, past or present. The wall section that survives most substantially runs from the north-west to the south-west; the remainder has been reduced to a low earthen scarp, two metres wide and less than half a metre high, its original form softened by centuries of weathering and the slow creep of soil and vegetation.

The enclosure lies just five metres east of a farm trackway, which means the surrounding landscape is still actively used, and the monument sits quietly within it, marked by nothing more than its mossy stones and that characteristic circular logic of its plan.

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Pete F
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