Enclosure, Tullycommon, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Tullycommon, Co. Clare

Above the 600-foot contour in the rough upland pasture of Tullycommon, County Clare, a circular form sits quietly within a landscape that has been shaped and reshaped across many centuries.

Roughly thirteen metres in diameter, it is not a dramatic ruin or a monument with a tidy interpretation board. It survives instead as a grassed-over ring, its enclosing element softened to the point where it reads more clearly from aerial imagery than it does underfoot. That kind of visibility, present in one medium and elusive in another, is part of what makes sites like this quietly compelling.

The enclosure sits within what appears to be an extensive multiperiod field system, meaning the surrounding landscape preserves traces of agricultural organisation from more than one distinct period of use. The enclosure itself is abutted at the west-northwest and northeast by relict field walls, also grassed over, which may in places actually overlie the enclosing element, suggesting that the enclosure predates at least some of the surrounding field boundaries. Whether it was a small farmstead, a livestock enclosure, or something else entirely is not established, but the layering of features around it points to a place that people returned to and reworked over a long stretch of time. Circular enclosures of this general kind are found across Ireland in considerable variety, ranging from early medieval ringforts used as defended farmsteads to simpler pastoral enclosures of less certain date.

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