Enclosure, Slievecarran, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Slievecarran, Co. Clare

On the south-facing slopes of Slievecarran in County Clare, tucked into a natural hollow in the hillside, sits a small circular enclosure that most walkers would step over without a second glance.

What looks like a low grassy ridge is in fact the remnant of a stone wall, tracing a rough circle roughly twelve metres across, and it forms just one element of a much larger field system that spreads across the plateau above.

Enclosures of this kind, sometimes associated with early medieval settlement or agricultural activity, were typically built as bounded spaces for livestock, habitation, or a combination of both. This one sits within an extensive network of field boundaries covering the Slievecarran plateau, suggesting that the area was once organised and worked with some deliberateness, even if the precise period and purpose remain uncertain. The wall itself had become so thoroughly absorbed into the landscape by the time satellite imagery captured it in the early 2010s that it read more as a topographical feature than a human construction. That gradual merging of the built and the natural is part of what makes sites like this easy to dismiss and quietly interesting in equal measure.

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Pete F
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