Enclosure, Teeskagh, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Teeskagh, Co. Clare

On a south-westerly slope in County Clare, among rough pasture and the exposed limestone pavements of semi-karst terrain, sits a stone enclosure that the Ordnance Survey cartographers of 1897 quietly labelled a sheepfold.

That label is accurate enough, but it understates what is actually here: a carefully built subrectangular structure, nineteen metres east to west and sixteen metres north to south, with walls formed from large slabs set upright on their edges rather than laid in conventional courses. It is a distinctly deliberate piece of construction, and it sits within a surrounding field system that belongs to several different periods of land use, layers of human activity compressed into one hillside.

The enclosure appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1842 and 1920, which places it firmly within the nineteenth-century agricultural landscape, though the field system around it is considerably older and more complex. The single entrance is positioned in the north-east corner, a practical orientation that would have suited the movement of livestock. Two animal pens are attached to the outside of the southern wall, suggesting that the enclosure was used in a fairly organised way, separating animals by some purpose or category. A short distance to the north-west, approximately nineteen metres away, a small corbelled pen of more recent construction sits alongside the older structure. Corbelling is a technique in which stones are laid in overlapping horizontal courses, each projecting slightly inward, until they meet at the top without the need for any mortar or keystone, and the tradition of building small field structures this way has persisted in parts of the west of Ireland well into the modern era. The co-existence of the older slab-walled enclosure and this newer corbelled pen gives the site an accidental quality of a working archive, different building methods and different centuries sharing the same patch of limestone ground.

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