Enclosure, Ballycahill, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
On the north-western slopes of Ailwee Hill in County Clare, a low earthen bank traces the outline of an ancient enclosure that most people walk past without a second glance.
Roughly sub-oval in shape and measuring approximately 70 metres along its north-east to south-west axis and around 40 metres across, it is the kind of feature that rewards a careful eye rather than a casual one. A modern trackway cuts straight through it from north to south-west, a reminder that the land has been worked and reworked across many generations with little ceremony paid to what came before.
The enclosure sits within what archaeologists describe as a multiperiod field system, meaning the landscape around it preserves traces of agricultural organisation from several different eras, laid one over another like geological strata. These systems are relatively common across the Burren and its fringes, where thin soils and exposed limestone have discouraged the deep ploughing that elsewhere erases such features. The enclosure itself is defined by a bank, the classic boundary feature of early Irish settlement and farming, and it was identified through aerial and satellite imagery, specifically Ordnance Survey orthophotography from the period 2013 to 2018 and Digital Globe imagery, rather than through any ground investigation. That means the full depth of its history remains unexcavated and largely unknown.