Enclosure, Ballyvaskin, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyvaskin, Co. Clare

In the townland of Ballyvaskin, in County Clare, there is an enclosure.

That much is certain. What it looked like, who built it, and when they did so remains, for the moment, unrecorded in any publicly accessible form. It exists as a monument on the official register, named and located, but otherwise silent.

Enclosures of this kind, when their details are known, tend to be ringforts or their close relations, the most common surviving field monuments in Ireland. A ringfort, broadly speaking, is a roughly circular area defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used primarily as a farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly between 500 and 1200 AD. Ballyvaskin sits in west Clare, a landscape that has seen continuous human settlement from the prehistoric period onward, and enclosures in such areas can range from modest single-bank farmsteads to more elaborate enclosures with souterrains, underground stone-lined passages that were used for storage or refuge. Whether this particular example fits any of those descriptions is not currently established in the public record. It is a dot on the map with a name attached and, for now, little else.

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